Modern Hebrew in adult secondary education: a study of students’ attitudes at Abendgymnasium Wien
The teaching and learning of Modern Hebrew as a second/foreign language (L2) may be considered a rare phenomenon in adult secondary education in Austria, with most Hebrew classes being offered by the Jewish communities, adult education centres (Volkshochschulen) and, at the tertiary levels, by university language centres. As with other calls for curricular reform, the implementation of Hebrew classes in adult secondary education may be associated with various factors such as learner attitudes as well as the overall viability of the intended language programme. This paper presents the findings of a qualitative content analysis (cf. Gläser & Laudel 2010) of 30 student interviews at Abendgymnasium Wien, an adult secondary school in Vienna. An open hierarchical category system is developed based on students’ attitudes expressed in the interviews and annotated with the text analysis software MAXQDA. This category system is inductively supplemented in the extraction phase of the project with newly emerging topics, or existing categories being modified and further specified. It is hypothesised that attitudes towards learning Modern Hebrew are embedded in a net of discourses and subdiscourses (Reisigl & Wodak 2016) with metalinguistic and metapragmatic links attestable. This empirical documentation on “linguistic reflexivity” (Spitzmüller 2019) seeks to provide detailed insights into students’ attitudinal response towards Hebrew language learning in the specific institutional setting of adult secondary education. It may serve as a basis for the implementation, cultivation and promotion of a Hebrew language programme in andragogical practice.
References
Gläser, Jochen; Laudel Grit. 2010. Experteninterviews und qualitative Inhaltsanalyse. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.
Reisigl, Martin; Wodak Ruth. 2016. “The discourse-historical approach”. In Methods of critical discourse analysis, ed. Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer, 21–61. London: Sage.
Spitzmüller Jürgen. 2019. ‘Sprache‘ – ‘Metasprache‘ – ‘Metapragmatik‘: Sprache und sprachliches Handeln als Gegenstand sozialer Reflexion. In Handbuch Sprache im Urteil der Öffentlichkeit, ed. Gerd Antos; Niehr, Thomas and Jürgen Spitzmüller. 11–30. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Linguistics and Knowledge about Language in Education 