Bedouin Youth:
Trilingual Program 'Opens Doors'

Daphna Berman

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.

Developing language skills in this historically underprivileged community, she stresses, will ultimately "open doors" and allow Bedouin youth to participate in various realms in Israeli society that were formerly off-limits, and to compete on a more equal footing in the job market.

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, 55, who has lived in Jerusalem since immigrating Israel in 1971, has earned a doctorate in applied languages and currently heads the English department at Levinsky Teachers College in Tel Aviv. She believes that teaching Arabic, Hebrew and English as separate subjects - standard practice in many schools - is ineffective, and says: "We need to teach the commonality of language ... Usually language teachers work separately. But if we can get them to work and plan lessons together, we can change their perceptions of language."

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."

The program, now being implemented on a pilot level in three schools and due to be evaluated in April, may help expose the ways in which the brain processes information, according to Goldfus: "Language acquisition starts with the brain and if we understand how language is acquired and taught, then we will become better teachers. If we understand the functioning of the brain on a cognitive level, then we can teach language more effectively and, hopefully, increase literacy."

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."

Her deep involvement in the realm of Bedouin literacy has exposed Goldfus to some intriguing phenomena. She has seen students choose Hebrew, rather than Arabic, as their preferred "language of identity," because Hebrew is viewed as "a key to their success." Despite their relative weakness in English, many students show great eagerness to study the language because of the job possibilities it may open up to them.

There are some limitations with the program. For now, it has only targeted schools in recognized villages, excluding 11 schools in unrecognized ones. Also, though the Ministry of Education "knows that the program exists," it has so far refused to fund it. The team has received a pledge of NIS 8,000 from the Amal network. For her part, Goldfus insists she is dedicated to the program, both financially and academically: "I'm doing this for an ideal."

Goldfus "would love" to see the program adapted for communities of Russian- and Amharic-speaking schoolchildren, but admits that she "doesn't think it will happen in the reality of today's budget cuts."