Attitudes and Psycholinguistic Aspects of First Language Maintenance among Russian-Jewish Immigrants in Israel

ABSTRACT This study investigated the social attitudes and academic skills in Russian and Hebrew of Russian-Jewish immigrant students in northern Israel. The Russian community in Israel is unique in that its members maintain their language and culture and always show their singularity as a strong cohesive ethnic group. A total of 60 participants took part in the study. They answered an attitude questionnaire and the following tests in Russian and Hebrew: working memory, oral cloze, visual condition, phonological condition, orthographic condition, word attack, word identification and spelling test. Further, for validation of attitudes results beyond self-report questionnaires, 30 open interviews were conducted. The results indicated that these Russian new immigrants were inslrumentally oriented towards learning Hebrew. They possessed moderate anxiety and did not learn Hebrew for army service purposes or to integrate into Israeli society. Their attitude towards the class-learning situation was not very positive. The results of the linguistic skills in Russian and Hebrew indicated superiority of the former. Regression procedures indicated that only the spelling test score of the Russian language was a significant predictor of Hebrew word recognition.