Educational Alternatives, Volume 21, 2023

Rezumat: The article describes a new approach to teaching Hebrew to young children. The pupils are children aged 5-7 from different cultures (Jews, Arabs, immigrants) who are studying as part of extra-mural studies at the "Mofet" Centre in Jerusalem. From the beginning, the children learn to read and write in Hebrew. In the first stage of instruction in reading Hebrew nikud diacritical marks (vowel marks), the children learned to associate the vowel sound in the language, which is usually marked by a diacritical mark under the written letter, with a physical gesture. This gesture was invented as a parallel sign to the diacritical mark. In Hebrew, there are several diacritical marks for the same sound. For this reason, the emphasis in learning is placed on a mark that is repeated as a part of a diacritical mark within the different diacritics to signify the same vowel sound. The children were asked to identify and display the repeated diacritical mark and to know how to relate it to a vowel sound that exists in the spoken language. Instruction was carried out by accelerating the learning of the Hebrew alphabet through learning the letter R (resh) outside its alphabetical order, to give children a larger vocabulary during the early stages of instruction, and to teach the writing of several letters whose written form is based on the written form of that letter. Next, the children learned several consonants by creating words that do not exist in the living language. The letters were joined into words according to their original sequence and these sequences were given an invented meaning. The children knew the word and only then learnt the letters that it is built from. The acceleration was done so that the children could switch to reading expressions and short sentences as quickly as possible. By the end of the first school year, the children were able to read the printed letters and write in written Hebrew letters, not only single words but also expressions and short sentences.