Druze minority students learning Hebrew in Israel: The relationship of attitudes, cultural background, and interest of material to reading comprehension in a second language

This study investigated Israeli-Druze students' reading comprehension in Hebrew as a second language as related to their attitudes and cultural background and the interest of the material. The Druze are unique in Israel in being a cultural and linguistic Arab minority, but they are highly identified with the Israeli-Jewish destiny. Seventy-six Druze students participated in the study. They were administered attitude questionnaires, individual interest questionnaires, Arab and Jewish cultural stories and ten multiple-choice comprehension questions about each story. The results indicated strong positive attitudes towards learning Hebrew and towards Israeli society. However, the subjects revealed higher positive interest in reading the culturally Arab stories than the culturally Jewish stories, and their reading comprehension scores accorded with their preference. The conclusion is that cultural familiarity with text and readers' individual interest in text are related and essential variables in second-language learning. Thus, interest in reading is text-based, a fact that should be considered in minority education. In the case of the Druze minority in Israel, measures beyond 'self-reported questionnaires' are needed to validate the contradictions between their feelings and attitudes and their reading and interest scores.