The development of literacy in selected bilingual societies was investigated. Historical and comparative studies were conducted of medieval Jewish communities, the Navajo community, a northern New Mexico village, and the countries of Paraguay and Tonga. The goal of the case studies was to develop a model for the development of literacy in the…

Four papers originating from the Kesher project, a project in Israel involving the construction, implementation, and scientific evaluation of an original Hebrew language intervention program for preschool (ages 0 to 6) children with hearing impairments, are presented. The four papers included are: (1) "Language Intervention in Prelinguistic…

This publication (one of a series) contains 19 articles which report the status and progress of studies on the nature of speech, instruments for its investigation, and practical applications. Articles are: "Speech Perception Deficits in Poor Readers: Auditory Processing or Phonological Coding?" (Maria Mody and others); "Auditory…

Guidelines for Hebrew language proficiency are presented in two companion volumes which are identical except that one gives examples of various linguistic forms in Hebrew and the other provides them in Roman script. These guidelines are based on the generic guidelines published in 1986 by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages.…

A study was designed to investigate a problem of university level second language (L2) reading comprehension courses, namely, whether to treat reading as a problem of language or of reading strategies. The subjects were six undergraduates who had completed a standard English as a Foreign Language (EFL) reading comprehension course, and a control…

A discussion of the ease or difficulty of learning vocabulary words in a second language looks at a variety of issues in second language instruction. Research on factors in vocabulary learning is discussed, focusing on such factors as similarity in form and morphology, deceptive morphological structure, different syntactic patterning in the native…

Adult native speakers of Hebrew, English-speaking learners of Hebrew, and an additional group of native English speakers were administered a discourse-completion test. Results indicate that to some extent speech-act realization in interlanguage benefits from the activation of a non language-specific pragmatic competence. Conformity to the…

A third report on the evaluation of a trilingual school program in French, Hebrew and English being offered in two schools in the Montreal area. The purpose of this evaluation was to continue to monitor the development of the pilot groups in the following areas: French, English, Hebrew and mathematics. (AMH)

This study of 15 Hebrew-speaking preschool children with specific language impairment and 2 comparison groups tentatively supported the notion that grammatical morphemes were less difficult for subjects if they take the form of stressed and/or lengthened syllables and if they appear in a language in which nouns, verbs, and adjectives must be…

Three experiments examined initial fixation position effects for Hebrew readers. Experiment 1 found the preferred viewing location for Hebrew readers to be to the right of the center of words and not modulated by inflectional morphological constraints. Experiments 2 and 3 indicated that derivational morphological constraints do modulate the…

An analysis of a televised interview, in Israel, of an actress playing a role in a play is presented as an illustration of politeness marking in modern Israeli Hebrew. The interviewer is well-known as an educated Ashkenazi Jew, the actress a singer well-known for her vocal portrayal of Sephardic Jews, and in this case playing an exaggeratedly…

Papers included in this compilation are "Late Hebrew Immersion at Mt. Scopus College Melbourne: Towards Complete Hebrew Fluency for Jewish Day School Students" (S. C. Lorch, T. F. McNamara, E. Eisikovits); "Languages in Schools: Policy and Practice" (Roger A. Peddie); "Models and Sociolinguistic Factors in Some Victorian…

A study on children's speech is prefaced by an extensive theoretical discussion. An attempt to construct a taxonomy that captured psychologically real, discrete types of communicative acts in mother-child interactions was based on the insight that verbal utterances are social acts that are meaningful in particular social situations. The taxonomy…

The revival of Hebrew as a modern spoken language in the early part of this century is discussed. The usage of spoken Hebrew in the Middle Ages and its evolution within and outside the Middle East are described. The interpretation of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda's late nineteenth century interest in reviving spoken Hebrew as a call for general spoken Hebrew…

The development of interactive video materials for developing listening comprehension in beginning learners of Hebrew as a second language is described. Initially, videotapes presenting stories in the form of interviews set in Israel were designed and produced according to current instructional design theory. These were viewed by the prospective…