The Development of the Hebrew Language amongst Arabs and Jews in Bilingual-Binational Schools in Israel

Abstract

The current research examined the acquisition of Hebrew as a second language amongst both Arab students and Jewish students, for whom it is their mother tongue, studying in bilingual schools. Their achievements in Hebrew were compared to their peers’ achievements in monolingual schools: Jews were compared to their Jewish peers in Hebrew monolingual schools and Arabs were compared to their peers in Arabic monolingual schools. The students were given various assignments in Hebrew to test words recognition, pseudowords, phonological awareness, orthographic knowledge, morphology, syntax judgment, working memory, spelling and reading comprehension. The data was analyzed by one-way ANOVA and Tukey post hoc test. The results that stand out are that Hebrew as a second language does not come at the expense of birth tongue skills amongst Arab students and that the birth tongue of Jewish students was not impaired either. The consequence was that all students “earned” a second language. This study was compared to other similar researches conducted in other countries with spoken languages, and was discussed in the context of meta-linguistics theories, Cummins theory of mutual threshold, the monolingual facilitation theory and the Structural Sensitivity Hypothesis.