This chapter focuses on a retrospective report of the language experiences of native bilingual Israelis who were born to immigrant parents around independence (1948). It does so by examining narrative life stories of adult Israelis who reconstruct, and reflect on, the impact of language(s) in their lives. Growing up in a period of transition from…

Advocacy strategies are characterized by collaborations amongst various stakeholders working together to create changes and reforms. In language education policy, this refers to various types of initiatives and activities intended to create language policy reforms on local and/or national levels. In this paper such activities are traced, analyzed…

When invited to respond to the story of Rosa Parks through describing whether they encountered similar events within their Israeli context, the minority Palestinian-Israeli EFL ninth-grade students in this teacher research narrated stories resonating with Rosa's story. Evident in their narratives were events that left an immense impact on them. A…

In this hybrid ethnographic case study, I explore how a cadre of Israeli-American parents in Los Angeles navigate the local Hebrew education landscape to seek linguistic resources for their children. I examine how participants envision Hebrew learning and determine the roles of Jewish, Israeli-serving, and public schools in transmitting Hebrew…

The current study was part of a large project focusing on bilingual development in the preschool classroom context. Its aim was to theorize free play as a social and language learning activity that provides opportunities for young learners to move towards second language production. The role of free play for language development in general, and…

This paper reports on a study that examined a Shared Education program recently implemented in Israel based on the Northern Ireland model. Sixth-grade children from two schools -- one Jewish and one Arab, who study in separate education systems and have very limited contacts with one another -- met to learn English (as an additional language)…

Learning a new language after forced migration has hardly ever been studied from the perspective of children. Their viewpoint, however, gets even more important, if we want to understand the lifelong consequences of their early experiences. With this aim, we use autobiographical accounts of persons who were rescued from Nazi Germany and brought to…

Israel's Education Ministry invited proposals for the development of a new multilingual policy for the country's education system. We submitted a proposal for an 'engaged language policy' approach, which helps schools to conceptualize and develop a policy that best fits them ideologically and demographically. This study aimed to map teachers' and…

The fact that Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) also includes historical consciousness is known, but this dimension of ICC has so far been largely unexplored. This article aims to show that virtual cooperation between universities from two different countries can promote not only ICC but also critical historical thinking. Using…

This article describes how to help students connect what they learn in the language classroom to the outside world as they learn to understand, produce, and analyze spoken, written, visual, and cultural information in their second language (L2). As learners make connections between course material and the physical and virtual spaces where the L2…

This paper presents an ethnographic study analyzing the influence of students' social backgrounds on students' entitlement and agency in relation to floor rights. Classroom interactions were video-recorded, and interviews were conducted in a socially diverse fifth-grade in Israel. Descriptive statistics and micro-analyses of participation patterns…

Though the relevance of language teachers' native/non-native (N/NN) background has been researched extensively, little is known about its applicability to cases where the lecturer uses English as the medium of instruction (EMI). This study's purpose, which was conducted in Israeli higher education institutions, was to elicit students' perceptions…

International student mobility (ISM), particularly degree-mobility, has been primarily portrayed as the rational pursuit of economic advantage in an increasingly competitive and stratified global hierarchy of nations, academic institutions and qualifications. This focus on what has been portrayed as the pursuit of 'cosmopolitan capital', has led…

This qualitative study, examining seven communities in the globalized Asia Pacific area, aimed to investigate Jewish community attitudes toward Hebrew, their heritage language (HL), as influenced by the social environment. The main finding was that the "complex ecology" of context influences attitudes to Hebrew. The article delineates…

Attitudes towards language and language education policy (LEP) interact with groups' identities, internal dynamics and intergroup relations. Combining quantitative and qualitative measures, we focused on the Habad community--a Jewish ultra-Orthodox (UO) minority in Israel--exploring its LEP and community attitudes toward languages meaningful to…