Hebrew in Tel Aviv, Beijing, Denver, and Melbourne: assessing peer learning in a multicultural environment

ABSTRACT

This article evaluates a curriculum based on a peer-learning model between seven Israeli students whose Hebrew is their mother tongue and thirty-nine peer students from around the world who have chosen to study Hebrew as a foreign language. The aim of the program is to improve foreign language discourse skills through intra-personal and inter-personal interaction in multicultural, personal, and authentic contexts of the students. The described assessment approach, the circular model of Stuffelbeam – CIPP, examines students’ experiences and focuses on their perceptions and actions in the program sessions to provide a more applied and accurate response to needs that arise from the field and improve for the coming years. The findings were collected from a digital portfolio that includes three parts: (a) documentation (b) reflective process (c) meta-cognitive. We found that students face challenges: (1) content (2) feedback (3) technology. Peer learning exposed the students to the skills of learning together and increased their motivation to get to know others and construct new meanings about content, ways of teaching, and innovative pedagogy that emphasizes the involvement of learners, autonomous learning, personal responsibility, and self-regulation in the learning process.

KEYWORDS:

• Peer learning
• program assessment
• teaching a foreign language
• intercultural competence
• multicultural dialogue

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dolly Eliyahu-Levi

Dolly Eliyahu-Levi, Head of the Hebrew language department for elementary school and high school at the Levinsky College of Education, Tel Aviv, Israel. Her research focuses on multicultural and multilingual issues, on the development of intercultural competence, E-learning, and emotional-social learning. She teaches courses that deal with the practice of rhetorical discourse, distance learning, and cultural-socio-resilience of minority communities.

Sigal Chen

Sigal Chen, Head of the Hebrew language department for elementary school and high school at the Levinsky College of Education, Tel Aviv, Israel. Her research focuses on multicultural and multilingual issues, on the development of intercultural competence, E-learning, and emotional-social learning. She teaches courses that deal with the practice of rhetorical discourse, distance learning, and cultural-socio-resilience of minority communities.