"I think I have grown professionally, because my world-view of the whole notion of bilingualism has been enhanced," said Patricia Saul, a teacher trainer from the Caribbean island of Barbados. "But more importantly, I have grown as an individual." I expressed surprise. After only three weeks in Israel? I asked her. "Yes," she said. "I have learned from the lectures, of course, but much of the linguistics was already familiar to me. The thing is our classroom was a laboratory. I learned from my colleagues as they shared what's happening in their countries, how they are dealing with their problems, what solutions have worked and what haven't. I learned a lot about people and other cultures."
Saul's "classroom" was indeed remarkable. In November and December, 2001, under the auspices of MASHAV, 27 early childhood education (ECE) professionals representing 23 countries - from Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa, to Eastern Europe and Western and South-East Asia - gathered in Israel's Mediterranean city of Haifa to discuss the "Educational Implications of Bilingualism and Multilingualism in Early Childhood." Their own multilingualism was itself something special: among them they were proficient in 61 different languages!
As we sat in her little office in the Golda Meir Mount Carmel International Training Center (MCTC), course director and veteran educator Janette Hirschman talked about how the course had come about: "We've had a number of courses in the past on emergent literacy and on learning difficulties. At the end of the courses, we always ask the participants for suggestions for the future, and the issue of bilingualism and multilingualism came up very strongly. If a child hears its mother-tongue at home, hears another language on the street, and a third - like English - at school, in what language should the child be taught to read and write?"
The official course brochure suggested an answer: "Children who have a good command of their mother-tongue will rapidly and easily acquire a second language as they need it. They also need to hear their language validated in order to have greater confidence in their culture and in themselves as mother-tongue speakers."
That is precisely the problem that disturbs Patricia Saul. English is the official language of Barbados, but the vast majority of its small population grow up speaking Creole, a blend of English with the rhythms and structures of West African languages brought over by slaves centuries ago. The resilience of Creole in the face of English education is intriguing in itself, but Creole is not officially recognized, and some families, said Saul, will not speak it at all "because it is perceived as an inferior language, associated with the uneducated." Saul insists that Barbados is in fact a bilingual country, whether that fact is officially recognized or not, and that Creole is "the essence of what makes you Barbadan." In relaxed social situations, even people fluent in English slip back into Creole. She is critical of a school system which "does not allow students to use Creole, and thus to express themselves freely. We are robbing them of part of their Barbadan identity."
I still needed to ask the question: If Creole is fairly intelligible to a non-Barbadan English-speaker, can it not be considered just a sort of "street version" of English rather than a separate language? Saul conceded that the lexicons of English and Creole are very similar, and that a child could be more confused trying to keep them apart than if the two languages were completely different, but she maintains that Creole has its own grammar and phonology, its own morphology and syntax, all key indicators of a distinct language.
She is concerned about the problem Barbadan children have in expressing themselves in Standard English, and hopes that by learning how countries with "authentic" bilingual or multilingual situations deal with them, "we can get some ideas on how to approach our problem." She is certain of her thesis, that Barbados is really bilingual, but she needs field data to prove it. She wants to launch a pilot program that would allow children to speak Creole in the first year of nursery school, and only begin to introduce English gradually in their second year. That would certainly be consistent with the ideas of strengthening and validating the child's mother-tongue before confronting him with another language.
I asked Patricia Saul what she had gained from the program. "I greatly valued the opportunity to go to different schools and see different approaches to bilingualism and multiculturalism. We've seen situations in which Hebrew and Arabic are taught simultaneously; situations in which the language is introduced in the spoken form and only later in the written form; and situations in which the mother-tongue is used in the early grades, and the Hebrew or Arabic only later. That last model has reinforced my feeling that if children are taught in their first language, they will have less difficulty learning the second language." She was referring to the village of Kafr Kamma in the Lower Galilee, a village of Muslim but non-Arab Circassians who have zealously preserved the language and culture they brought from the Russian Steppes in the 19th century. "The teachers there reported great gains in the performance of the children with that approach," said Saul. "That impressed me most of all."
The picture in India is far more complex. Uma Chandrashekaran runs a nursery school/kindergarten in Neyveli, in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. She was urged to participate in the course by an Indian research foundation that has benefited in the past from MASHAV projects in the field of agriculture, but also runs a teacher training center with which Chandrashekaran is connected. She shared with her colleagues at MCTC the roster of one of her classes: 15 pre-schoolers in one class speak no fewer than 8 mother-tongues!
With the single exception of the state of Tamil Nadu, Indian public schools teach three languages: the regional language or lingua franca of that particular state; Hindi, which is the national language of India; and (from age 8) English as the country's official language. At some point in the past, the state government of Tamil Nadu refused to have Hindi "imposed" on it, and it is thus not taught at all in the Tamil-speaking state public system. Chandrashekaran deeply regrets that decision, which has deprived people of the ability to move easily around India and find work outside their own state.
Chandrashekaran's immediate concerns, however, have to do with the system of private schools. In India, a good command of English is "the golden door which leads to better jobs," she said. Since the standards of English teaching in the public system are low, many families save up to send their children to private schools, in which the children can learn either Tamil or Hindi as a second language. Chandrashekaran feels that they shouldn't be forced to make that choice, and that Tamil, as the spoken language of the state, should enjoy the same status as English.
And that leads to her second concern, the way English is taught, not "through the oral method of hearing and speaking, but by rote. At age 3, children who have never heard English spoken are plunged into learning the alphabet and numbers in a very rigid way. There are many ways the children could be assimilated into the mainstream language [that is, English] through their native language. Furthermore, from speaking to the other participants on this course, I find that in most of their countries formal learning only starts at age 6. It's wrong for our children to start so young."
The trip to Israel was an eye-opener for Uma Chandrashekaran. "I have not seen schools in my country of the kind we visited here. For example, in the two bilingual schools, they emphasized the importance of listening. Children are being spoken to in both Hebrew and Arabic." But even in Israel that's the exception, I said. "Yes. And we were lucky to see the exceptions, because it gave us a perspective of what is possible. If I can tell 20 teachers at a time back home that this is possible, that it is being done in other countries, we can do something about it. For example, we saw the 'Ulpan' [where new immigrants to Israel are taught Hebrew, with special emphasis on communication skills]. They have developed so many materials to introduce children gradually to the language, and make it interesting. I liked the approach: If you want to create an Israeli identity, Hebrew is a very big part of it."
Kaneng Daze of Nigeria is faced with linguistic challenges that are quite similar to and no less complex than those of India. There are over 500 distinct languages in Nigeria, over 30 in Daze's native north-central Plateau State alone. Daze trained in linguistics, and, after a foray into the business world, returned to her first love and established a private nursery school and kindergarten in Jos, the regional capital. It has grown year by year, and is now a full primary school. The free public school system in Nigeria is not highly regarded, said Daze, and (as in India) families "struggle to send their children to private schools, where they believe they will get better equipped for life."
Also as in India, the Nigerian educational system has to juggle between the mother-tongue learned in the home, the regional language (Hausa in Plateau State and all of northern Nigeria), and English, which is the official common language of the country. Young children coming into the pre-school system are not allowed to speak their mother-tongue (unless it is Hausa). Yet in Jos, where it dominates the market-place, Hausa is not officially taught in class until secondary school. Daze wants to see that change, and have the indigenous language introduced at primary school level.
In the gap between the babel of mother-tongues spoken by pre-schoolers and the study of Hausa only years later by secondary-schoolers, English is introduced, and has become the country's lingua franca. In the rural villages there is little exposure to English, but in the urban areas, said Daze, it is almost a native language for many Nigerians. In many homes it is spoken alongside the mother-tongue and children are exposed to it through television. The result is that when Nigerian children begin nursery school at age 3, they may not understand everything that is said to them in English, but they have been exposed to it, and (unlike the Indian example) the language does not sound "foreign." However, when it comes to the old-fashioned way English is taught - "teacher instructs, children repeat" - Daze is as unhappy as her Indian colleague. She prefers a more interactive approach, with "activity corners" in which children are encouraged to simulate a market, for example, and experiment in using language (their mother-tongue if need be) to communicate with other children.
Daze also bemoaned the impact of politics on language in her country. The long-time tranquility of Plateau State was shattered last year by riots and clashes between Muslims and Christians. The Hausa people are predominantly Muslim, and Daze (herself a Christian) is concerned that any attempt on her part to introduce the Hausa language into her primary school curriculum at this time could be perceived as a political statement.
She brightened when I asked her about her experience in Israel. She too was impressed by the Arab-Hebrew bilingual schools ("I pray that it will work, that it will catch on"), by the mother-tongue Circassian school, and by the three-language approach (Arabic, Hebrew and English) of the Arabic-speaking Druze community near Haifa itself. But, like Uma Chandrashekaran, what "made" it for Daze was the "Ulpan" system. Among the new immigrants learning Hebrew were African Jews from Ethiopia. "Wherever you're coming from, you have to learn Hebrew. It is the indigenous language of the Jews. That kind of pride in your heritage is what I would like to see in my country."
The situation in Macedonia, one of the former Yugoslav republics, is quite different to those of India and Nigeria, but with many parallels to Israel itself. Croatian-born Ljiljana Kalinic-Ordev teaches English "for specific purposes" to students of other departments at the University in Skopje, the capital, but her real field is socio-linguistics. "I'm very interested in what happens when adults change countries. People migrate for many reasons: economic or political, or, like me, because of intermarriage. What happens to them? How do they acquire a new language? How do they maintain the old one? And how do they feel about the two languages and the two cultures, the old and the new?"
She could almost be talking about Israel, a country that is in the business of immigrant absorption, and the teaching of the local language - Hebrew - by the "Ulpan" immersion method. We discussed issues of bilingualism and multilingualism that had been presented by different participants in the current MASHAV course, and whether the problems were universal or specific to each situation. A bit of both, it seemed, but then Kalinic-Ordev talked sadly about Macedonia itself, about the recent separatist violence there, and the impact of politics on the issue of language. Minorities in Macedonia - Albanians, Serbs and Turks - are allowed to run their own mother-tongue primary and secondary schools, and the Albanian community (the largest and most self-conscious minority) even has its own university. On the one hand, it is a policy that respects other cultural traditions and avoids submerging them in some "melting pot." On the other hand, as Kalinic-Ordev put it, "a minority should be encouraged to learn and become fluent in the national language, otherwise it leads to self-isolation." The comparable example of Tamil Nadu came to mind.
Because language is such a badge of ethnic identity, a tense political climate does not encourage bilingualism and biculturalism. (I told her that we in Israel could empathize with that.) But there is hope (here too). Macedonia is experimenting with six completely bilingual kindergartens, with each small class led by an equal number of Macedonian- and Albanian-speaking staff. Those responsible for the project had in fact visited Israel to explore models for the experiment, said Kalinic-Ordev, and were impressed by what they had found here. So was she. There is a fully bilingual Hebrew-Arabic nursery school / kindergarten in the Jerusalem YMCA; and the MASHAV course sat in on two bilingual primary schools in areas with significant Arab minority populations, one in Jerusalem, the other in the Lower Galilee. These Kalinic-Ordev considered her most valuable visits. "And the atmosphere of the course was great," she enthused. "The MASHAV people did a wonderful job organizing everything, and we all appreciated the way they treated us."
Ljiljana Kalinic-Ordev did not come to the course expecting to learn about linguistics theory - she is an academic herself - but about "the situation in different countries: case studies. We've just heard a presentation by Uma, for example. I've read books about multilingualism in India, but when a school principal herself gives you a list of names of kids in one of her own classes, together with all their mother-tongues, that's really something different."
What is it about Israel that attracts educators from abroad? I asked Janette Hirschman. Israel has acknowledged expertise in fields like agriculture and rural development, technology and computerization, and the organization of local authorities and NGOs. What is its record in Early Childhood Education?
"A very impressive one," says Hirschman. "Kindergarten for 5-year-olds has been compulsory in Israel since soon after statehood in 1948, and early childhood education in Israel is considered by many to be one of the best. Israel has been through all the stages of a developing nation, and we have a lot to share and a lot to show. In addition, the courses MASHAV offers have a very pragmatic approach, and that is attractive to participants seeking practical solutions to problems of early education back home."
But it doesn't stop there, Hirschman continued. "We get lots of requests from other countries for assistance in their country. MASHAV sends out teams, usually of two experts, to work with, say, 30 early childhood education professionals, and help develop programs tailored to their specific needs. We reach more people that way, and at some levels the impact we can have is greater than a course run in Israel."
In addition, she said, "because of the fact that over the last 50 years Israel has absorbed so many people from so many different cultures, speaking so many different mother-tongues, a tremendous amount of research has been done here. Israel is a laboratory, and that too makes it a good place in which to run courses like this." But despite Israel's experience in the field of bilingualism and multilingualism, Hirschman hastened to add, "we don't give any kind of recipes here. We don't say this is how it should be done. We provide a lot of information, and we expect that the participants are at the kind of professional level where they know what they need, and are able to take it from here and apply it in their own countries."
And the planning of the program? Truly a team effort, said Janette Hirschman, with some of the course lecturers (Dr. Anita Rom, speech and language specialist, lecturer at the Kibbutzim Teacher Training College, Dr. Marian Fredman, speech and language specialist, and Dr. Rhonda Sofer, anthropologist and lecturer at the Gordon Teacher Training College) suggesting lecture topics and field trips best suited for the group, and involved in fine-tuning the program while it is running. They must have got it right, if the excitement of the participants was anything to go by.
Aside from the program, I asked the four participants, what did it mean for you coming to Israel? This is, after all, not just any land: it is the Holy Land for almost half the human race.
Kaneng Daze of Nigeria comes from a devout Evangelical Christian family (her mother has been to Israel four times). Did she have any doubts about coming to Israel at this restless time? "None whatsoever," she said, visibly tingling with emotion. "I felt it was the right thing to do, and it was the right time to do it. It was like a dream come true. I was so excited about being in the Land of the Bible."
Patricia Saul of Barbados was also "excited about coming to Israel. My friends were concerned about my safety, but I always felt confident. I liked the spirit of the people and the openness I found here. I have a Christian background, so going to Jerusalem was very wonderful, almost spiritual. I came away feeling a need to reassess what is really important in my life."
"I'm not a religious person in the usual sense," confided Ljiljana Kalinic-Ordev of Macedonia, "but I believe that God is in every one of us, and that we all have something in common. It was fascinating for me to find three great religions in one place. But in the end, you have to be human first and have a heart for other people as well, and then you can talk about your nation and your religion."
This was her first trip abroad for Uma Chandrashekaran of India, and "it took a lot of courage. But I have a very supportive family, and they said 'we are praying for you - you go.' I'm a Hindu, but I studied in a Christian school, so I know the Bible quite well. When you visit Christian sites, at some level you understand the basic feeling behind it, the emotions people feel, and you realize it happens in all the religions: it's about feeling more than anything else. For me it was like a pilgrimage too."
That sounded like a good statement to make on Mount Carmel, the very hilltop on which the Biblical prophet Elijah chastised the people about "limping between two opinions." No limping here. The participants in the MASHAV course on Bilingualism and Multilingualism in Early Childhood Education went striding home with determination: certainly professionally, and perhaps in other ways as well.
Jewish-Arab Bilingual School
Education in Israel is streamed according to first-language needs. The same government Ministry of Education determines curriculum and hires teachers for both Hebrew-medium and Arabic-medium schools. The two language groups seldom meet, but when they do, their common language is Hebrew, spoken by the country's 80% majority.
In 1981, the Jerusalem YMCA took a new aproach, and opened a mixed Jewish-Arab preschool. It took ten years for the number of Israeli Arab children to catch up to the Israeli Jewish children, but even then the classes where either Hebrew-speaking (Jewish) or Arabic-speaking (Muslim and Christian Arabs), though they frequently came together for join activities.
In 1996, the YMCA recreated itself as a preschool of completely mixed and bilingual classes. Today it has 135 children, aged 2 to 5, with a fairly even split among Jews and Arabs, and among the latter between Muslims and Christians. Two of the six classes are still "homogeneous," one of Arab children, conducted in both Arabic and Hebrew, the other of Jewish children, in Hebrew only. Each of the other four is completely mixed, and each has two qualified teachers, one Hebrew-speaking, one Arabic, each speaking to the kids in her own native language. "We're not trying to create a melting pot," says the principal, Daphna Bassewitch-Ginzburg. "We want to affirm the individual and ethnic identity of every child. Our emphasis is on educating to recognize the 'other,' and affirm the language and culture and religion of others."
Educator Amin Khalaf is a Muslim Arab from a village in the north of Israel. He wants to inculcate Arab culture, Arab identity and Arab pride in Arab children, and at the same time build bridges with his Jewish neighbors on the basis of complete equality. Some parents had doubts at first - the question of preserving ethnic identity came up - but after three years at the YCMA preschool, many of the families wanted to continue the bilingual Jewish-Arab experiment. The problem was that no framework beyond the preschool existed.
Khalaf founded the Center for Bilingual Education, and that in turn produced the Bilingual School in Jerusaelm, and two sister schools elsewhere in the country. "The hope is that our children's generation will grow up together with a different experience to our own," he said. "The process of integration has been very intresting, both for us and for the Jewish parents. It opened up lots of opportunities for the families to meet and get to know each other." (Khalaf's older son, who was in the first mixed preschool class at the YMCA, is now one of the "seniors" at the school; his younger brother is at the preschool and will move up next year.)
The Bilingual School runs four classes, from kindergarten through 3rd grade. Each class has two teachers, one Arab and one Jewish (Hebrew-speaking), and all subjects are taught in a combination of both languages. "We educate for equality and tolerance in our day-to-day life," declared principal Dalia Peretz-Amzalik.