Getting Ready...

My trip to Israel will begin in a little over a month (June 18). Some of you have asked what, exactly, I'll be doing. So, at the risk of boring some who know this well, here's the deal.

For the last couple of years, I have been involved in something known as the COHELET project. The COHELET project, as you can see from the link above, seeks to apply the insights from the study of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and apply them to the study of biblical Hebrew. In short, it seeks to teach biblical Hebrew in the same way that a modern language (such as Spanish or German) would be taught. Rather then emphasizing memorization of paradigms and "decoding" of a text, the communicative approach of the COHELET project seeks to emphasize the communicative nature of the language. So, students produce in the language (biblical Hebrew), rather than simply study it as an artifact. The goal is to help students become the best readers and interpreters of the Old Testament that they can be. They can best achieve that through learning the comunicative function of the language, primarily through production.

The experience at Bethel over the last two years has been phenomenal. Students have made more progress in reading Hebrew more quickly (and with more enjoyment) than I would have thought possible. They are measurably more capable than their counterparts who were taught in the traditional approach to the language. Anecdotally, they seem to retain more and actually use Hebrew after they have completed their grammar courses.

My experience in the COHELET project has completely changed my approach to teaching Hebrew. I am convinced that it is the most effective way of helping people learn to really read Hebrew and be independent interpreters of the text.

Unfortunately, I was not taught this way myself. The learning curve for me has been incredibly steep as I have had to learn to produce in biblical Hebrew in order to teach this way. While the work I have done has been tremendously rewarding (I find myself improving as a reader of the text as a result of shifting from a "decoding" to a "reading" approach), I need to be better at this if I am going to be able to be effective in teaching this way.

So, I will spending 4 weeks at the Biblical Language Center just outside of Jerusalem. A COHELET project design team member, Randall Buth, conducts biblical Hebrew immersion courses at Kibbutz Tzuba. There, I will be a student in a course and have opportunities to observe how beginners are taught via this method. My prayer is that I will be more effective in reading, interpreting, and teaching the text of the Old Testament as a result.

I hope to be posting frequently from Israel and keep any interested readers up to date on how things progress there.