The aim of the current study was to examine the relations between reading literacy and statistical literacy of Hebrew-speaking college students (L1) compared with Arabic-speaking students whose second language (L2) is Hebrew. The contribution of reading skills to statistical literacy in L1 and L2 students and the differences between the groups,…

Israel's population includes over a million Russian-speaking immigrants and more than 300,000 native English speakers. These groups differ in social integration and in the status of their heritage languages in Israel. We compared children's and parents' perceptions of children's identities, language abilities, and language preferences among…

The current study followed literacy skills development amongst 79 Arabic native speaking pupils from kindergarten to fourth grade. Based on reading comprehension attainments in fourth grade, two groups of skilled and poor readers were identified. Poor readers showed significantly lower performance on measures of phonological and morphological…

The demands of teacher educators underwent a major change. They not only are required to excel in teaching, but also to conduct research as an essential part of their professional life. This ambivalence raises questions regarding their professional identity. How can they identify with their profession if their roles keep changing? Two native and…

To isolate cross-lingual phonological effects during visual-word recognition, Arabic-Hebrew bilinguals who are native speakers of Spoken Arabic (SA) and proficient readers of both Literary Arabic (LA) and Hebrew, were asked to perform a visual lexical-decision task (LDT) in either LA (Experiment 1) or Hebrew (Experiments 2 and 3). The critical…

This article presents research on teaching English in Israel, a vibrant multilingual country, in the period between 2014 and 2020. After a brief introduction to the current approach to English language teaching around the world, it outlines the studies investigating: (a) learners of English, (b) English teachers, and (c) methods that are used in…

The current study quantitatively examines the professional identity of 150 EFL teachers in the Israeli educational system. Findings indicate that native English-speaking teachers ("NESTs") rate themselves higher than non-native English-speaking teachers. Still, fewer differences between the groups were found than predicted. While the…

Information literacy is an essential proficiency for success in academic studies, yet many first-year students find it hard to use information sources efficiently and to develop academic information literacy. This study reports findings from first-year students' self-estimation of their information skills according to two information literacy…

This study investigated the mode of directness of requests and refusals and the background variables that explain this production in two trilingual populations in Israel (i.e. native speakers of Arabic for whom English is an L3, and Hebrew, an L2, and native speakers of Hebrew for whom English is an L2 and another language is their L3). Data were…

Immigrant teachers -- although discussed in different disciplines and from different perspectives, their potential to transform the educational approach towards multilingualism remains unknown. The present paper addresses this lacuna by focusing on language beliefs in one specific group: new immigrant teachers. Arriving as professionals and…

The goal of the present study was to extend the models explaining the missing-letter effect (MLE) to an additional language and orthography, and to test the role of phonology in silent reading in Arabic. We also examined orthographic effects such as letter position and letter shape, morphological effects such as pseudo-prefixes, and phonological…

The study examined the impact of two grammatical factors on marking Hebrew adjectives in agreement with plural nouns in adults with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) compared with peers without ADHD. Participants were 36 adult speakers of Hebrew, who were administered a judgment test of 144 sentences, each containing an adjective in…

Israeli university students who have difficulty reading academic texts in English are required to take reading comprehension courses in English for academic purposes (EAP) in order to complete their BA degree. Whereas most students pass the courses, some repeatedly fail. Since Israel is a multilingual country, there is also a question about…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the potential contribution of decoding efficiency to the development of reading comprehension among skilled adult native Arabic speakers. In addition, we tried to investigate the influence of Arabic vowels on reading accuracy, reading speed, and therefore to reading comprehension. Seventy-five Arabic…

We examined reading proficiency, focusing on fluency, in 56 Russian-speaking language minority (LM) students and 56 native Hebrew-speaking (NH) peers. Fifth-grade students completed measures of Hebrew reading accuracy and fluency from word to text level as well as phonological awareness (PA), RAN and vocabulary. LM students read single words less…