Facing bilingual education: kindergarten teachers’ attitudes, strategies and challenges: Kindergarten teachers' attitudes, strategies and challenges

This article examines how majority-language teachers coping with additive education view their roles in a bilingual framework, how they perceive issues of culture and language in young bilingual children, and how they understand the term ?bilingual education? in an L2 non-additive context. The study has been conducted in the context of pre-school bilingual education of second generation Russian-Hebrew speaking immigrants from the former Soviet Union in Israel. Using an ethnographic approach comprising observation, interviews and life histories, a set of behaviours and beliefs has been revealed, enabling us to compare approaches in two bilingual ? Russian-Hebrew ? kindergartens. This is discussed at both the micro- (teachers? reports) and the macro- (Israeli language and educational policies) level.