Why Bonnie and Ronnie Can't Read (The Siddur)

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Why Bonnie and Ronnie Can't “Read” (the Siddur)

Lifsa Schachter
Online publication date: 03 March 2010
To cite this Article Schachter, Lifsa(2010) 'Why Bonnie and Ronnie Can't “Read” (the Siddur)', Journal of Jewish
Education, 76: 1, 74 — 91
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Journal of Jewish Education, 76:74–91, 2010
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ISSN: 1524-4113 print / 1554-611X online
DOI: 10.1080/15244110903553916
Why Bonnie and Ronnie Can’t “Read”

1554-611X
1524-4113
UJJE
Journal of Jewish Education,
Education Vol. 76, No. 1, January 2010: pp. 0–0
(the Siddur)
LIFSA SCHACHTER
Why Bonnie
Journal of Jewish
and Ronnie
Education
Can’t Read
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In the last issue of the Journal (volume 75, number 4), we read
about our esteemed colleague Israel Scheffler’s love affair with
Hebrew. In this issue, we continue the conversation about Hebrew
as part of a series of articles by distinguished senior colleagues who
bring the wisdom earned by a lifelong career in Jewish education.
Many of us share Scheffler’s love affair with Hebrew, and we are
anguished by the challenges facing the American Jewish commu-
nity with regard to the teaching and learning of Hebrew language.
Whenever educators sit together, no matter the setting, they discuss:
What are the best ways to teach Hebrew? What are ambitious, but
reasonable goals for Hebrew language learning in pre-schools, day
schools and after school programs? What constitutes literacy in
each of these settings?
In this article, Lifsa Schachter, professor emeritus of education at
the Segal College, shares some of her ideas on a range of questions
such as these. Her ideas emanate from the research literature on
second language acquisition, as well as from her own experiences
and experiments designed to make a difference in the domain of
Hebrew language learning. Lee Shulman (Shulman, 1987) asserts
the validity of using the “wisdom of practice” in addressing educa-
tional challenges such as this one. Hebrew language teaching is an
instance where experienced practitioners hold much knowledge.
Yet, little of their knowledge has been committed to writing.
We’re delighted to share this article with you and hope that it
encourages others to write about grappling with the challenges of
Hebrew language learning in our schools. We encourage our
senior colleagues in particular to share their wisdom about this
and other issues that can make Jewish education vital and vibrant
for the Jewish people in the twenty-first century.
Lifsa Schachter is professor emeritus of Jewish education at Siegal College of Judaic Studies. E-mail:
LSCHACHTER@siegalcollege.edu
74
Why Bonnie and Ronnie Can’t Read 75
Despite a renewed interest in Hebrew in the supplementary school marked

by an array of new, attractive, and computer-supported textbooks, the prob-
lems related to learning Hebrew in the supplementary school have
remained as intractable as ever. Neither educators nor parents would dis-
agree with the statement that “the teaching of Hebrew outside of Israel has
not been a success story” (Shohamy, 1999/2000). Nowhere is this truer than
in relation to the minimalist goal of many supplementary schools to provide
students with skills that allow for competent performance at the bar mitzvah
and bat mitzvah ceremonies. This need not be the case even under the con-
straints of the supplementary school.
Aryeh Wohl has identified 11 areas that impact on Hebrew instruction

(Wohl, 2005).1 In this article, drawing upon the literature on brain research
and literacy, I focus primarily on five of these areas. I discuss the evolving
understanding of what is meant by reading, the oral basis of literacy,
Hebrew orthography, the need for a clear understanding about the differ-
ences between how the English and Hebrew alphabets function, and what
we know about how to increase learner motivation to make the study of
Hebrew more meaningful, active, and social. Insights are drawn from many
years of working with teachers, directors, and students in the supplemen-
tary schools of Cleveland, Ohio, where I worked with children who were
struggling to decode Hebrew successfully. Through reading, experimenta-
tion, and reflection I found ways to help them. I have taught these ideas
and strategies to teachers with little background in Hebrew or language
teaching. This work led me to develop “theories that are inductively derived
from careful examination of the data” (Hatch, 2002, p. 26), producing find-
ings that “include analytic generalizations, descriptions, patterns” resulting
in a new grounded theory (pp. 14–15). I conclude this article by suggesting
teaching strategies based on this body of research and reflections that have
successfully met the limited Hebrew goals of the supplementary school.
Children in supplementary schools say that they are learning to read
Hebrew. Adults often say that they can read Hebrew but that they do not
understand what they read. But are they truly reading? A reading specialist
with a doctorate in teaching English reading to native English speakers, who
also teaches children in a Jewish supplementary school, once told me that
she had mentioned to an audience of several hundred people at a reading
conference that she also teaches children to read Hebrew, but they have no
comprehension of what they read. At this, the entire conference burst into
laughter. One participant asked incredulously why anyone would want to
do that.
We know why we teach these skills to Jewish children, but we must
understand that what we teach children in the supplementary school does
1
While Wohl’s focus is on the day school, the areas he addressed are relevant to the supplementary
school as well.
76 Journal of Jewish Education
not match most accepted definitions of reading.2 In the world outside the
supplementary school, reading has a range of definitions, but the primary
one is to derive meaning from printed symbols. In the supplementary school,
the primary tasks related to print are decoding, sounding out unknown
words, and reciting or declaiming prayers, but not reading in the commonly
accepted sense.
DEFINING READING
The evolution of the concept of reading provides a lens with which to

examine issues facing Hebrew instruction in the supplementary school.
What it means to be print literate has undergone dramatic expansion over
time. During the colonial period in America to be literate meant to have the
ability to sign one’s name or even to affix an “X” on a deed. Later, schools
delivered “recitation literacy,” the ability to recite portions of some standard
texts such as the Gettysburg Address. Deriving meaning from print was not
emphasized. This kind of literacy is similar to what many people can do
with previously learned prayers from the Siddur, the Hebrew prayer book.
During the World War I, army testers discovered that soldiers who
could pass the army’s literacy tests could not understand new texts that had
not been previously taught to them. This led to a new form of literacy called
“extraction literacy,” or the ability to extract the basic “who, what, and
where” facts from a document. While at that time this appeared to be a rev-
olutionary development, society currently demands a “higher literacy,”
which includes the ability to draw inferences and read reflectively (Wolf,
1988, pp.1–4).
Research on reading describes the extent to which reading is difficult
for many people. It is unlike speaking, which most people, except for those
physically impaired, acquire naturally. In America an effortless journey to
print literacy is true for only five percent of the population. For 35% of the
population, reading is relatively easy once they have been exposed to for-
mal instruction. But for 60% of the population, it is either a formidable chal-
lenge or one of the most difficult tasks they will have to master (Lyon, 1998,
para. 1).
Contemporary reading programs include teaching students the skills
and the knowledge to understand how phonemes, or speech sounds, are
connected to print; the ability to decode unfamiliar words; the ability to
read fluently; the acquisition of sufficient background information and
vocabulary to foster reading comprehension; the development of appropriate
2
See the randomly selected example of the first definition of “read” in the Random House Dictionary
of the English Language, “to look at carefully so as to understand the meaning of (something written,
printed, etc.) (Urdang, 1968, p. 1098).”
active strategies to construct meaning from print; and the development and
maintenance of a motivation to read (National Institute for Literacy, 2007).
While controversies over the best approach to teaching reading continue,
even those who advocate a strong phonetic base for reading programs have
as their ultimate goal deriving meaning from printed symbols. The ability to
decode unfamiliar, not previously seen words is only one component of a
reading program. By contrast, sounding out unknown and unfamiliar words
is at the heart of most programs for teaching prayer book Hebrew.
A minimalist approach related to reading Hebrew texts has value and
has characterized Jewish practice over centuries. But this approach was suc-
cessful for a population that had an oral base for decoding, had a high moti-
vation for learning, and with the exception of a small minority, did little
higher level reading in any language. One must wonder how children in
Jewish supplementary schools today, exposed to a more sophisticated con-
cept of reading in English, understand their schools’ approaches to reading
Hebrew. What kind of impact can rote reading and reading without com-
prehension have on their understanding of and attitudes toward Judaism?
This is an area worth investigating.
THE ORAL BASE OF READING
Children do not need to be formally taught to speak, learning the rules of

language naturally. It is one of the most impressive of human accomplish-
ments. This is not meant to suggest that there is no place for developing
oral skills, only that they seem to be innate (Moats & Tolman, 2008). Speak-
ing is hard wired in the brain; speech capacity is thought to have evolved in
humans between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago. Alphabet-based reading on
the other hand is no more than 3,500 years old; it is a relatively newly
acquired skill except for a small number of people (Tallal, n.d.). Even in
Jewish society, which is widely known for almost universal literacy among
males for about 2,000 years, only recitation literacy has been relatively
widespread.
One of the most important findings from the research on reading which
maps areas of the brain that are activated when identifying print symbols, is
the extent of the speaking-reading continuum. Reading begins as an oral
process (“Ten years of research,” n.d.). “The foundation of reading is
speech and the organization of reading skills in the brain must be built on
this foundation” (Herron, 2008, p.80). Words are stored in the brain as
sounds and not as print images (Tallal, n.d.).
In the ancient world, the close connection between speech and reading
seems to have been self-evident. In Hebrew and in Arabic, the same word is
used for speaking and reading. We see this convergence in the text in
Deuteronomy when Moses commands the priests and Levites to assemble
all the people and “read the words of the Torah in their ears” (31:11, my
translation). The primary meaning of the verb (likro) is to call out; the
secondary meaning is to read. The Torah is also called Mikra—from the
same root—and its study involves both meanings of the verb (Berman,
2008, p.117). The public oral reading of the Torah and the out-loud study of
Torah remain fixtures of Jewish life. In The Laws of Torah Study the
Rambam asserts that “when one studies out loud, his learning endures—but
one who reads silently will forget quickly (Hilchot Talmud Torah, 3:12, my
translation).” Reading remained an oral experience well into the middle
ages. Libraries were noisy places. People registered surprise when they saw
others looking at books without making any sounds (Manguel, 1996, p. 2).
Reading begins in and is based on oral sounds. Decoding involves put-
ting sounds one already knows to letters (Tallal, n.d.). In the earliest stages
of learning, to sound out printed symbols, children’s sensitivity to the
sounds in spoken words (i.e., phonological awareness) greatly facilitates
their developing word analysis skills; children who lack this awareness have
trouble learning to read (Spear-Swerling & Sternberg, 2001). Louisa Moats
(1998) argued that “[o]ne of the most fundamental flaws found in almost all
phonics programs, including traditional ones, is that they teach the code
backwards. That is, they go from letter to sound instead of from sound to
letter . . . The print-to-sound conventional phonics approach leaves gaps,
invites confusion and creates inefficiencies” (pp. 44–45).
LEARNING TO READ HEBREW IN THE CONTEXT

OF THE SUPPLEMENTARY SCHOOL
The reality of Israel where Hebrew is a dominant language in society has

obscured our understanding of the relationship between Hebrew language
competency and literacy and the Jewish people throughout time. Jews have
long lived in multilingual communities. An early example is implied in the
Midrash that states that one reason the Israelites were redeemed from sla-
very in Egypt is that they did not change their language (Leviticus Rabbah
32:6). Jews have lived in communities where Hebrew may have been privi-
leged, but was not the only spoken language, or in communities where
Hebrew may not have been a spoken language at all. The translation of the
Bible to Aramaic during the Talmudic period implies that during this period
Hebrew was not the everyday spoken language of the Jewish people. A
long string of Jewish languages such as Judeo-Arabic, Ladino, and Yiddish
accompanied the Jewish people through time. What is different about the
current situation is that most American Jews live in a society dominated by
one language and that for most, Hebrew is not privileged nor does it enjoy
the status of a language living in liturgy, ritual, and song. Without diminish-
ing the importance of Hebrew as the language of Israel and its ability to
unite worldwide Jewry, the fact that Hebrew survived the millennia as a lim-
ited language can reassure us that we are not facing an insurmountable
problem.
In the supplementary school, children typically spend two to three
years learning the alphabet. From third to sixth grade they review the letters
and vowel signs, practice reading parts of words, non-words, and clusters of
words, often without relation to regular word patterns and sequences. They
may even practice letter combinations that cannot occur in Hebrew words.
They also practice reciting specific prayers and are taught a limited vocabu-
lary. Despite all the time spent at these tasks, few can apply decoding skills
with any fluency to untaught material.

After many years of study, students generally remain hesitant and
unsure when sounding out new material. It is a rare learner who reaches a
level of automaticity and fluency that allows for decoding new material with
ease characteristic of good decoders (Lyon, 1998, para. 1). Most children
require extensive tutoring in decoding skills as part of bar mitzvah and bat
mitzvah preparations (Schachter & Ofek, 2008, p. 226).
Yosi Gordon (1982) describes the three processes through which
children in the supplementary school encounter print as reading, decoding,
and reciting (pp. 109–110). But reading, widely defined as a “complex sys-
tem of deriving meaning from print . . .”3 (National Institute for Literacy,
n.d.) rarely happens in that setting.
Generally, the formal curriculum of supplementary schools is based on
decoding and reciting. It revolves around an increasingly limited number of
prayers to which children are introduced through the processes of sounding
out individual letters, clusters of letters and other symbols. Key ideas of the
prayers and roots of words are also taught so that students understand a
small number of words; but reading for meaning is, at best, a limited part of
the supplementary school literacy agenda.
Others have commented on the broader issues related to learning
Hebrew and point to confusion relating to goals and other contextual fac-
tors to explain this failure (Aron, 2004; Deitcher, 2007; Rodman; 2003; Sho-
hamy 2000; Spolsky, 1986). While these are important conversations, the
focus of this article is on what we can do to make the student encounter
with print more successful. I have found that by attending to these factors it
is possible to raise the level of student achievement even given the existing
contextual factors, and that this has implications for raising parental and
communal expectations as well.
3
This is the definition of the Partnership for Reading, a collaboration of three federal agencies—the
National Institute for Literacy, the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human
Development, and the U.S. Department of Education, which has as its goal promoting reading through
research-based strategies and advocacy.
WHY DECODING HEBREW IS DIFFICULT
When Hebrew texts are pointed, that is, when the texts include symbols to
indicate vowel signs and other pronunciation symbols, Hebrew letters have
symbol sound constancy; a letter will always sound the same, no matter
where it is in a word or in association with whatever other letters it appears.4
This is in contrast to English where the sound of the letter is influenced by
its placement in a word and its relationship to adjacent letters. Because
Hebrew textbooks always include all of these symbols, learning to sound
out unknown Hebrew words is possible. This is the basis for most prayer
book Hebrew programs.
Overriding this helpful characteristic, a number of factors make learn-
ing to decode Hebrew difficult, including the students’ lack of an oral base
for learning to read Hebrew, Hebrew’s shallow orthography, misconcep-
tions about the Hebrew alphabet found in examples and explanations in
most textbooks and held by most teachers, and the absence of motivation to
learn on the part of many students (Haramati, 1983a).
Students’ Lack of the Oral Base for Reading

If teaching the code backward describes the print to sound approach to
teaching English phonics, how shall we describe the approach to reading in
the supplementary school that starts with isolated print symbols, that is,
letters, which the learner cannot associate with prior speech or verbal expe-
rience? Yet, this is precisely the approach of so many primers. Students are
shown a letter and then are asked to sound it out. They may have been
introduced to some of the words associated with the letters but they largely
lack extensive neural templates for Hebrew words associated with the letters.
The importance of the relationship between prior oral knowledge and
reading is confirmed for me every time I teach a crash course in Hebrew
decoding to adults. Usually the class has students who have some Jewish
background as well as those who do not. When the students with Jewish
background sound out words they know such as mazal tov or kiddush they
exhibit delight and pride in achievement. For those with no familiarity with
4
There are minor exceptions to this symbol/sound constancy. In contemporary Sephardic Hebrew
pronunciation, the dialect spoken in Israel and taught in liberal supplementary schools, the exceptions
are found in three of the beged kefet letters. The bet, the khaf and the peh have alternative pronunciations
and the shin can be pronounced as a’s. The bet, kaf, and peh can be pronounced as “v” “kh,” and “f”
when the letters appear in the middle or at the end of a syllable The tav retains an alternative pronunci-
ation as an “s” in Ashkenazi Hebrew, The difference in the gimel and the dalet can still be heard in
Yemenite liturgical reading of the Torah. It is important to understand that while these six letters can
each have two forms, the difference never indicates a difference in meaning. The shin can also stand for
two sounds, but these sounds do not have related meanings. Pointed texts use dots to indicate these
differences in pronunciation (Brettler, 2002, p. 5).
Jewish terms, sounding out these words is no different from sounding out
nonsense syllables and they have no clue as to whether or not they are cor-
rect. Similarly, children respond differently when sounding out known and
unknown words. So, one of the reasons Bonnie and Ronnie can’t “read”
Hebrew is that their brains lack prior auditory associations between Hebrew
letters and the printed material.
Given this need, why were the traditional primers such as Reishis Da-as
effective in the past inasmuch as they too are based on sounding out
abstract letters? The literature on the importance of prior experience with
the sounds of a language has helped me to understand why they did work.
In traditional Jewish societies, children encountered print after acquiring

rich memory banks of sounded Hebrew embedded in the prayers and songs
that they heard from infancy and began to recite from early childhood.
While they may not have communicated in Hebrew they were accustomed
to hearing Hebrew sounds including those incorporated in Yiddish, and
learned to recite a wide number of Hebrew prayers and songs long before
they were exposed to print. Some schools have been organized according
to this principle.
Jewish tradition has long recognized the importance of the oral base of
literacy. It finds expression in schools like Beis Mikra, in Monsey, New
York, where students are taught the Five Books of Moses orally, before
being exposed to print at the age of seven. The Barkai method, a growing
phenomenon in both Israel and the United States, introduces students in all
the grades to traditional texts through oral chanting, prior to reading them
(Esses, 2000).5
Hebrew’s Shallow Orthography.

Hebrew letters are minimally distinctive. This is true not only for the identi-
fied look-alikes, such as ( ) ayin and ( ) tzadi, ( ) mem, and ( ) tet. The ( )
yud, ( ) vav, and ( ) nun sofit are identical except for size. Other letters are
the same except for their orientation on paper; rotate a ( ) het and you
have a ( ) khaf. In English, while there are confusing mirror letters, size
and rotation do not matter.6 Most Hebrew letters are slight variations of
a box.
Readers who understand what they are reading use context and mean-
ing to help determine a letter. Reading “involves the ability of the reader to
exploit multiple sources of information in an overlapping series of informa-
tion processing stages” (Massaro, 2005, p. 37). But decoders have only
5
While there is no empirical evidence for the validity of this approach, its proponents anecdotally
report higher levels of achievement.
6
This should not be confused with mirror letters such as “b” and “d.” Rotate them and they still
remain what they were originally.
shape to go on. Haramati (1983b) cites stories in the Talmud (Bavli,

Shabbat 147b), which describe problems even sages encountered in distin-
guishing Hebrew letters one from the other.
By asking native Israelis at Hebrew University in Jerusalem to decode
Aramaic words that are written with the same Hebrew alphabet but which
they do not comprehend, Shimron and Sivan (1994) have demonstrated that
even Israeli college students have difficulty sounding out words only by the
shape of the letters. Not knowing Aramaic, even college students made fre-
quent mistakes in letter identification, errors they do not make when the
same letters appear in Hebrew. So another reason why Bonnie and Ronnie
can’t read is that they lack clues other than the shape of the letter to guide
them.
Misunderstandings About the Nature of Hebrew

Most textbooks treat English and Hebrew alphabets as fully analogous
when they are not. Hebrew differs from English in that the Hebrew alpha-
bet is made up of consonants while the English alphabet includes letters for
consonants and vowels. At one point in the evolution of Hebrew, before the
invention of the vowel sign system in use today, four consonants, the aleph,
heh, vav, and yud were enlisted to serve double duty, serving sometimes as
consonants and sometimes as vowels.7 But they do not constitute a full
complement of vowel signs. Thus, English letters can be combined to make
every sound in the English language, while in Hebrew, the vowel sounds,
with the exception of the inclusion of the four letters described above, are
implicit (Even-Shoshan, 1984). This has led many linguists to conclude that
Hebrew is not a true alphabet (Sampson, 1985; Shimron, 1993). Some of the
confusions in student textbooks arise from their authors’ treatment of
Hebrew as a true alphabet.
A reader of an unpointed text who knows Hebrew is informed about
the sound of the consonant from the context. A Hebrew letter in an
unpointed text can represent not only the consonant itself but a range of
syllables. A bet, for example can stand for bah, beh, bee, bo, or bu. In a
pointed text, the vowel signs tell us which of these sounds the particular bet
represents but the vowel sign itself has no sound. It is incorrect to teach
these signs as though they were true alphabetic vowels with sounds similar
to “a” “e” “i” “o,” and “u” (Even-Shoshan, 1984, pp. 912–913; Haramati,
1983a, pp. 23–25).8
7
These letters are known as imot kriyah (matres lectionis), serving sometimes as a consonant and
sometimes as a vowel sound. One can distinguish these two functions easily in pointed texts. When
functioning as a vowel these letters will never be accompanied by either a vowel sign or a sh’va.
8
Haramati expands on the error of teaching a bet with a patah as though it is “b” + ah = bah.
In part because the vowel signs are taught incorrectly, are usually not
identified by their names, and are also minimally distinctive, the vowel signs
present the learner with even greater difficulty than do the consonants.
There are additional difficulties because of the difference in spoken modern
Hebrew and classical Hebrew, especially with regard to the vowel signs.
Consequently decoders make more errors in identifying vowel signs than
they do identifying letters (Haramati, 1983b, pp. 89–91).
Linguists who treat the Hebrew alphabet as a true alphabet assign
sounds to the vowel signs, treat the sh’va as a vowel sign, and remove the
sound from the aleph and ayin. Hebrew grammarians, on the other hand,
indicate that the vowel signs merely move the consonant, as implied by the
Hebrew term for the vowel sign - t’nuah, (mover), treat the sh’va as a dis-
tinctive sign, and include the aleph and ayin among the other gutturals such
as the khet and the heh (Even-Shoshan, 1984, pp. 912, 913).9
Some might argue that inasmuch as the students in the supplementary
school do not ever read from unpointed texts that these differences are not
relevant. However once one gets beyond the most basic identification of let-
ters and vowel signs, these differences as well as the presence of other
grammatical errors found in most textbooks, do matter (Schachter, 2004).
Lacking an understanding of the true structure of the Hebrew alphabet
deprives learners of the ability to break words into syllables or to see the
patterns and structure of Hebrew. One needs to know that a sh’va is distinct
from a vowel sign in order to be able to break words into syllables. One
needs to know that the aleph is one of a group of guttural letters, all of
which take a hataf vowel sign to make sense of the hatafim under the
aleph. One needs to know that the bet and vet are the same letter in order
to recognize the common meaning of bayit (house) and b’veito (in his
house). Not understanding the basic structure of Hebrew leads students to
think of Hebrew as an irrational language.
“Children who learn to read well are sensitive to linguistic structure at
the level of speech sounds, parts of words, meaningful parts of words . . .
They can recognize repetitious patterns in print and can connect letter pat-
terns with sounds, syllables and meaningful word parts quickly, accurately
and unconsciously” (Moats, 2000, p. 8). The ability to use what one knows
about language and how its parts work together is one of the skills of effec-
tive readers. There is a range in the extent to which primers in use to teach
children today pay attention to these aspects of language, and teachers are
rarely alert to them and their significance for effective decoding. These con-
fusions and errors deprive students of the possibility of using the structure
of Hebrew to recognize patterns and word parts. They cannot enlist the
9
This information is found in other standard Hebrew grammar books such as that by Livny (Linvy &
Kokhba, 1973). Textbooks on the other hand frequently misrepresent this information. The best discus-
sion of these points is found in Sampson (1985).
executive function of the brain to solve word puzzles: students address each
new encounter with print as though from a blank slate (Gaskins, Satlow, &
Pressley, 2007). The absence of this capacity is another reason why Bonnie
and Ronnie cannot read.
IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE
A number of schools in the Cleveland area with which I have worked have
seen significant improvements in children’s decoding by using the insights
of research on the brain, learning, and reading Hebrew to shape their pro-
grams and train their teachers. The director of one of these schools told me
that, after incorporating the approaches based on these principles, her stu-
dents accomplished more in two years than they previously accomplished
in five. Because the students acquired basic decoding skills, she was able to
expand the Hebrew program to include some communicative skills and
reading for meaning.
Laying the Oral Foundation for Literacy

Instruction in Hebrew should begin significantly prior to exposing students
to print. We should provide learners with oral encounters with the lan-
guage, even when our goals for Hebrew instruction are to develop profi-
ciency in decoding Hebrew prayers. The discussion of the oral base for
literacy indicates that the foundation for decoding is established by furnish-
ing the mind with the sounds, the patterns, and the meaning of words.
Encountering Hebrew in songs, prayers, games, and simple conversation
creates both templates in the brain with which print symbols can resonate
and feedback loops letting the learner know when reading correctly.
These oral activities should precede any formal program around
Hebrew print. Many supplementary school programs begin Hebrew instruc-
tion with teaching the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. They are influenced
by the now widely accepted idea that the early introduction of the alphabet
is critical to learning to read (Shaywitz, 2003). This finding derives from
research on children learning their mother tongue. It must be emphasized
that when learning to read one’s mother tongue, reading is introduced only
after many years of exposure to and experience with speech. The child in
the supplementary school has no comparable exposure to Hebrew sounds.
Similarly children learning their mother tongue are exposed to print
throughout their environment. This peripheral exposure to print must find
its way into the environment of the supplementary school during the period
of oral language instruction. Classroom and school environments should be rich
in Hebrew print so that students will have had prior peripheral exposure to
the shapes of Hebrew letters before embarking on a formal literacy program.
Oral programs should continue during the first two to three years of
supplementary school, following two paths: One should consist of learning
to sing the liturgy and other Hebrew songs using the best song leading
methods available. The use of music can provide pleasure and also helps to
bond memory (Dhority, 1998). Initial explanations about the meaning and
significance of the prayers and their structure in a service should supple-
ment the singing and the chanting. Children should have opportunities to
celebrate their achievements and to demonstrate their learned skills in
appropriate settings.
The second path should introduce students to Hebrew as a meaningful
language. Vocabulary taught should help children function in the class-

room, and should be related to holidays, rituals, prayer, and Jewish values.
While there are a number of approaches for doing this, I have found signif-
icant success using total physical response (TPR) developed by Asher (2000).
TPR introduces a second language in a way that helps students acquire
it naturally, in ways similar to those they used to acquire their first language.
TPR instruction minimizes stress and allows the student to internalize lan-
guage patterns (Dhority, 1998). TPR does not require a teacher with native
proficiency. The teacher introduces students to an increasingly broad reper-
toire of commands which the learners follow. Their physical movement
bonds their memory. Learners experience the method as a fun game. After a
silent period analogous to the first year of a baby’s life, the students reverse
roles with their teacher and offer original commands to their classmates.
Pre-Reading
During this oral stage decoding should not be explicitly taught, but the
classroom should be rich with Hebrew print including posters, labels, and
books, providing necessary pre-reading experiences. Praying and singing
should be accompanied by large charts with words laid out in ways that
assist in phrasing and highlight repeating patterns (Haramati, 1983b, p. 173–
175; 1985). This peripheral exposure insures that the decoding lesson is not
the learner’s first encounter with Hebrew writing and primes the brain for
reading.
Teaching According to Sound Grammatical Principles

All of the strategies used for introducing students to decoding should be
based on accurate grammatical principles, guided by attention to removing
obstacles that might come from interference from one’s mother tongue
(Schachter, 2004). Strategies should stimulate active learning and problem
solving, and not only recall (Pinell & Fountas, 1998). When the formal
introduction of decoding begins, it should be based on words that are
known and have meaning for the learners, providing them with necessary
feedback loops. Students should never be asked to sound out strings of let-
ters and vowel sounds that cannot be found in real Hebrew words or that
violate Hebrew grammatical principles.
Teachers should introduce letters and words with as much meaning as
possible to enhance recall (Jensen, 1999). The letters can be enriched by
stories of their origins and midrashim that tell their stories. Words have his-
tories, belong to root families, and can be linked to children’s interests and
experiences.10 This gives the learner many links to the Hebrew letters in
addition to associating them with shape. The letters should be introduced
using as many sensory channels as possible. These approaches also
increase student interest.

When practicing Hebrew decoding it is especially important for stu-
dents to learn to break words into syllables from the very beginning, start-
ing with simple syllables and moving on to more complex ones.11 Attention
should be paid to word patterns. The goal of decoding practice should be
for the learner to reach a level of automaticity, freeing the brain for other
cognitive tasks and enabling them to interact with unfamiliar material.
Practice should include three kinds of exercises: those that focus on visual
discrimination; those that require matching shapes to sound; and those that
ask the learner to produce sounds. Phonetic drills should always be based
only on syllable patterns that can occur in real Hebrew words. Learners
should be taught a variety of strategies to figure out the sounds of words
(Schachter, 2004).
Once sufficient letters and vowel signs are mastered, the phonetic anal-
ysis of prayers previously learned through recitation can begin. Students
should be taught to break words into syllables from the very beginning,
starting with simple ones and moving on to more complex ones. It is critical
to lay out the more complex texts in ways that facilitate phrasing and pat-
tern finding (Haramati, 1983b, pp. 173–175). Compare these two small
extracts of text from a familiar prayer to see how this simple change can
facilitate decoding as well as understanding.
The text in a traditional primer or a Siddur looks like this:
Compare it to the same passage laid out according to Haramati’s

(1983b) principles:
10
Suggested resources: Grishaver, 1989; Eisenberg, 1976; Horowitz, 1960; and Encyclopaedia
Judaica (1971—1972) articles on the alphabet and Hebrew.
11
The definition of a syllable for Hebrew decoding is one or more letters with one vowel sign. The
sh’va is excluded from the count since it is not a vowel sign.
It is evident how the second selection facilitates accurate phrasing. But

even more, important language patterns are made visible. Prefixes and
suffixes become immediately apparent. It becomes easier to identify key
words. Teachers can guide students to discover all kinds of interesting things
about Hebrew. I have seen kindergarten children exposed to this layout
spontaneously point out patterns and identify words before they were intro-
duced to the letters of the alphabet.
With a bank of sight words, the internalization of frequent language
patterns and the ability to divide even the most complicated word into
syllables, the student will reach a sufficient level of competence enabling
the application of these skills to untaught and previously unseen texts
including other portions of the prayer service and Torah and Haftarah
selections.
Increasing Motivation to Learn Hebrew

Students who lack motivation to learn do not, while motivated students
will overcome many barriers (Guthrie & Alao, 1997). I witnessed the
power of motivation when I visited an underground Jewish Sunday School
in Moscow in the late 1980s. Despite untrained teachers and inadequate
materials, these students, who came together only once a week for several
hours, reached levels of achievement that would be the envy of all our
institutions.
What these students had and our students frequently lack, is a goal of
ultimate meaning. Learning Hebrew for the sake of the bar mitzvah and bat
mitzvah ceremonies is not sufficiently motivating. It is too remote for most
students until a few months prior to the event, and both the students and
their parents know that there can be last minute tutoring so that the child
will in any event be able to perform adequately for the ceremony.
Broadening the importance and visibility of Hebrew in the congrega-
tional community is crucial to increasing motivation. There should be public
discourse about the importance of Hebrew for Jewish identity and the
remarkable story of the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language. Synagogues
need to find ways to bring more Hebrew into their publications and
decor, to engage leadership in exploring the place of Hebrew for Jewish
continuity, and to make the ability to decode Hebrew a requirement for
leadership if Hebrew is to be viewed as something more than a requisite
for a rite of passage.
The suggestions made in this paper for making decoding more effec-
tive by making the process more meaningful can also enhance motivation,
leading students to spend more time practicing decoding. An oral founda-
tion and an implicit awareness of decoding principles can contribute signif-
icantly to decoding success. We must incorporate in our teaching as many
additional characteristics that influence student motivation as we can. The
starting point is the elimination of the characteristics that interfere with learn-
ing described above. Building strong communities in classrooms, engaging
students in cooperative efforts, incorporating multiple modalities in learning
activities, increasing engagement with on-line materials and other technolo-
gies that highly engage students, providing some choice among activities,
creating opportunities for students to publicly celebrate their achievements
and to use their Hebrew skills in authentic situations can all contribute to
eliciting more intrinsic motivation for learning and achievement (Jensen,
1999; Guthrie & Alao, 1997). Using the right tools, Bonnie and Ronnie can
learn to read the Siddur with pride, and maybe even go on to actually read
Hebrew for pleasure.
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Why Bonnie and Ronnie Can't Read (The Siddur)

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Why Bonnie and Ronnie Can't “Read” (the Siddur)

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Why Bonnie and Ronnie Can’t “Read”

Despite a renewed interest in Hebrew in the supplementary school marked

Aryeh Wohl has identified 11 areas that impact on Hebrew instruction

The evolution of the concept of reading provides a lens with which to

THE ORAL BASE OF READING

Children do not need to be formally taught to speak, learning the rules of

LEARNING TO READ HEBREW IN THE CONTEXT

The reality of Israel where Hebrew is a dominant language in society has

with any fluency to untaught material.

WHY DECODING HEBREW IS DIFFICULT

Students’ Lack of the Oral Base for Reading

In traditional Jewish societies, children encountered print after acquiring

Hebrew’s Shallow Orthography.

shape to go on. Haramati (1983b) cites stories in the Talmud (Bavli,

Misunderstandings About the Nature of Hebrew

IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE

Laying the Oral Foundation for Literacy

language. Vocabulary taught should help children function in the class-

Teaching According to Sound Grammatical Principles

increase student interest.

Compare it to the same passage laid out according to Haramati’s

It is evident how the second selection facilitates accurate phrasing. But

Increasing Motivation to Learn Hebrew

Aron, I. (2004). Teaching Hebrew in the congregational school. A report commis-

Esses, S. (2000). An analysis of the implementation of the Barkai method in the

Calfee (Eds.), From orthography to pedagogy: Essays in honor of Richard L.

Teaching phonics and spelling in the reading/writing classroom (pp. 23–32).

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