[etni] Trilingual program opens doors to Bedouin youth
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- Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 08:36:33 +0200
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Trilingual program 'opens doors' to Bedouin youth
Haaretz - Dec. 12, 2003
(The following are excerpts from the article. To read the whole article, go
to www.etni.org.il/news/bedouinyouth.htm or
www.etni.org/news/bedouinyouth.htm )
Classrooms full of 10th-grade Bedouin students in the Negev have begun
reading advertisements, writing jokes and analyzing their horoscopes - in
Arabic, Hebrew and English. This unusual phenomenon is the result of a new
literacy program that aims to bridge the educational gap between Bedouin
high-school students and their Jewish peers.
"This program can improve the level of Bedouin literacy and that can only
benefit Bedouin society and Israeli society in the long run," says South
African-born Caroline Goldfus, who specializes in language acquisition and
learning disabilities, and helped launch the program a year ago . . . . . .
. . . . . .
The literacy program was also initiated by Rachel Tal, inspector for
English-language education in the Amal technical school network; Sara
Hauptman, chair of the Department of Hebrew Literature in Achva College; and
Fuaz Mansour, a lecturer in Arabic at Tel Aviv University. The team's goal:
to develop a comprehensive educational model that involves teaching three
languages simultaneously . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Goldfus urges the Bedouin educators that she teaches once a week to find
common strategies when teaching the three languages, because "the thought
pattern is the same, only the language root changes." . . . . . . . . . . .
. . .
As part of the literacy program, 10th-grade Bedouin - who lag about three
years behind their Jewish peers in language skills - read identical passages
in three languages, each with a different level of sophistication. In the
horoscope lesson, for example, each paragraph is almost identical in
content, but the Arabic is at a more advanced level than the English.
Goldfus: "If you learn one language at a time, then your brain processes one
language. But if you learn three languages at a time, you train your thought
and cognitive processes to become familiar with elements common to all
languages."
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