Bilingual Education with Hebrew: Hebrew-Arabic in Israel & Hebrew-English in the USA
Language: English
Session: Bilingual education means that in one way or another two languages are present and are the medium of instruction concurrently in a school. A significant body of research has shown that receiving instruction in two languages at the same time, produces positive results with regard to overall cognitive development. In addition, bilingual education has proven to have certain societal and political implications depending on the model chosen and the goals stated. The session will tell the story of two, very different forms of bilingual education involving Hebrew. One is the ‘Hand in Hand’ initiative for bilingual and bi-national education in Israel. The other is the ‘Hebrew public’ initiative in the United States, where African-American students together with students from other communities are taught in Hebrew in an inner-city public charter school
Bio: Carmit Romano-Hvid is a former assistant professor in Modern Hebrew & Israel Studies at Copenhagen University. In recent years, she has been a teacher-trainer at a teacher training college in Copenhagen and a Hebrew curriculum coordinator at a public charter school in Washington DC, USA. For her PhD in Applied Linguistics she studied at Edinburgh University, Scotland and the Department of Modern Languages at CBS, Denmark. She published articles on Arabic-Hebrew bilingual schooling in Israel, Jewish-Palestinian encounters in the Israeli Media, and has worked on a research project about the role that Hebrew Plays in the lives of Palestinians in East Jerusalem.