The Role of Research in Language Policy

The Israeli Ministry of Education has recently funded a project aimed at promoting a new multilingual education (MLE) policy in Israel, partly as an outcome of more than two decades of advocacy for expanding the language repertoire of Israeli students. As the developers of this new policy, we adopted the ‘engaged language policy’ approach, according to which schools create their language policies according to their demographic profiles, ideologies, and vision. Furthermore, in order to address language policy questions vis-à-vis the unique multilingual challenges in Israel, and in turn engage schools in promoting their own policies, we conducted a series of empirical studies addressing pivotal issues to be integrated into the new MLE policy. In this presentation we will demonstrate how the results of two of these studies (out of a total of six) contributed to the development of the new policy. The first study addressed issues of multilingual assessment. Minority students (Russian- and Arabic-speakers, for whom Hebrew is their second language) received bilingual tests in academic subjects. They performed significantly better than their peers in the control group who received monolingual (Hebrew-only) tests. The second study examined the role of linguistic landscape as a tool for increasing multilingual awareness and promoting social justice. Students documented signs in their environment, which they identified as discriminatory in terms of linguistic representation, and modified them to be more inclusive in terms of language, identity, and other symbolic features. The insights derived from these studies had direct input into the new multilingual policy. Apart from reviewing the influence of these two studies and their contribution to the design of the new MLE, the presentation will discuss the essential role of empirical studies in shaping valid language policies.