Elana Shohamy
Biographic Data
| ID | 822128 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Elana Shohamy |
| GIVEN NAMES | Elana |
| FAMILY NAME | Shohamy |
| SIGNATURE | SHOHAMY E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Tel Aviv University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3462-1588 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 52 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 224 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 50 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1982 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Incorporating translanguaging in English instruction
The question of whether and to what extent should the learners’ language repertoire (LR) be incorporated into the teaching of English as an additional language has been controversial for decades. The findings reported in this paper are part of a large-scale research project funded by the Israeli Ministry of Education aiming to introduce a new multilingual education policy. This study investigates teachers’ beliefs and reported practices on the us…
Language policy and choice in Israeli kibbutzim
Recent studies highlight the critical role of Language Policy (LP) in shaping language behavior, choice, and identity within speech communities; however, its relationship with language choice, especially in unique sociolinguistic contexts, requires further exploration. Building on the framework of Spolsky’s (2003) LP model and Shohamy’s (in: Sustaining linguistic diversity: endangered and minority languages and language varieties, Georgetown Univ…
Spolsky, Bernard
This is a biographical entry on Bernard Spolsky, one of the most original thinkers in the field of applied linguistics. He had an important impact on advancing many sociolinguistic‐related domains such as language maintenance and revival, language policy, multilingualism, educational linguistics, and the history, use, and ethics of language testing.
The political challenges of language policy
This reaction to the Perspectives anchor article, ‘‘The Canary in Coal Country: Educational Policy, Politics, and the Dissolution of a Language Department (Thompson et al., 2025, this issue), is framed within the fields of language policy and language politics in nation-states. The article explores the complexities of language policy, focusing on the interplay between top-down (government-driven) and bottom-up (community-based) approaches. Langua…
Introduction to the tenth anniversary Special Issue of Linguistic Landscape
‘Shared Education’ and translanguaging; students at Jewish and Arab schools learning English together
This paper reports on a study that examined a Shared Education program recently implemented in Israel based on the Northern Ireland model. Sixth-grade children from two schools – one Jewish and one Arab, who study in separate education systems and have very limited contacts with one another – met to learn English (as an additional language) together. The study explored patterns of language use (English, Arabic, Hebrew) as well as the ways childre…
Bi/multilingual testing for bi/multilingual students
Notwithstanding the introduction of education multilingual policies worldwide, testing and assessment procedures still rely almost exclusively on the monolingual construct. This paper describes a study, part of a larger project fostering a new multilingual education policy in Israeli schools, exploring bi/multilingual assessment. It included two types of second language learners—immigrants from the Former Soviet Union, who learn all their school …
Advocacy strategies for a new multilingual educational policy in Israel
In Memorium
Critical Language Testing, Multilingualism and Social Justice
The paper reports on trends in language testing taking place over the years and aim at critical perspectives of testing and promoting inclusion, equity and justice. It begins with critical theories by Messick, Foucault and Bourdieu, leading to critical language testing (CLT) which focused on consequences and uses of tests. Given the power of tests and their detrimental effects questions were raised regarding the impact of language tests on indivi…
The Power of Tests
Toward a New Multilingual Educational Policy in Israel
Israel's Education Ministry invited proposals for the development of a new multilingual policy for the country's education system. We submitted a proposal for an ‘engaged language policy’ approach, which helps schools to conceptualize and develop a policy that best fits them ideologically and demographically. This study aimed to map teachers’ and students’ attitudes toward various principles and practices of multilingual education in order to gat…
Symbols and ideologies
Commodification of women’s breasts
Cosmetic surgery has become a widespread phenomenon in the last decades, especially in Colombia where a large number of women undergo it every year. This surgical boom is reflected in several Linguistic Landscape resources including the internet, where a growing number of cosmetic surgery centers advertise their procedures. Particularly common among these procedures is breast augmentation, which many Colombian women have at a young age. This arti…
Guardians of language
Asymmetries and inequalities in the teaching of Arabic and Hebrew in the Israeli educational system
The aim of this comparative study is to detect symmetries and asymmetries in the status of two major languages taught in Israel: Hebrew in Arabic-medium schools and Arabic in Hebrew-medium schools. The teaching of these two languages offers a unique case of language education policy where categories of ideology, policy, curriculum, methods, and assessment intersect. For Arabs, Hebrew is perceived as a major tool for upward mobility, but findings …
LL research as expanding language and language policy
The paper theorizes languages in public spaces in a broad framework consisting of multiple components beyond written texts in public spaces. These include among others, visuals, sounds, movements, gestures, history, politics, location, people, bodies, all embedded in the dimensions offered by Lefebvre (1991) of spaces as practiced, conceived and lived. Relating to Linguistic Landscape (LL) as a mechanism of Language Policy (LP), the paper frames …
Invited colloquium on negotiating the complexities of multilingual assessment, Aaal Conference 2014
The invited colloquium on New Directions in Language Assessment held at the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) annual meeting in Portland, Oregon on March 22, 2014 brought together an international panel of scholars to together explore the possibilities and challenges of translanguaging and bi/multilingual approaches in assessment. Together, the presenters of this colloquium argued that allowing bi/multilinguals to demonstrate th…
The discourse of language testing as a tool for shaping national, global, and transnational identities
While much of the work in language testing is concerned with constructing quality tests in order to measure language knowledge in reliable and valid ways, there has been a significant movement in language testing research that examines tests in the context of their use in education and society. This line of research exits from the notion that tests are not isolated events but rather powerful societal tools that are both driven by, and have impact…
Assessing Multilingual Competencies
All assessment policies and practices are based on monolingual constructs whereby test‐takers are expected to demonstrate their language proficiency in one language at a time. Thus, the construct underlying these assessment approaches and/or scales (e.g., the CEFR) is of language as a closed and finite system that does not enable other languages to “smuggle in.” This view is in stark contrast to the current understanding of multilingual competenc…
Linguistic Landscape in the City
This book focuses on linguistic landscapes in present-day urban settings. In a wide-ranging collection of studies of major world cities, the authors investigate both the forces that shape linguistic landscape and the impact of the linguistic landscape on the wider social and cultural reality.
Language policy as experiences
Personal experiences have rarely been viewed as part of the domain of language policy, since policies are generally created from the top down, often to meet ideological or political agendas. The study of linguistic practices in a small country like Luxembourg offers particular opportunities to consider how language policy needs also to be formulated from the bottom up, since it has a direct effect on the rights and opportunities of often marginal…
Language Teachers as Partners in Crafting Educational Language Policies
The paper presents an expanded view of language policy which incorporates a variety of policy mechanisms which are claimed to affect de facto language policies. These mechanisms include declared policies, language education documents, language tests and language in public space, among others. These policies are initiated and determined by ''policy bodies'' which are part of governments and other groups in authority, but are detached from those wh…
Linguistic Landscape
Linguistic Landscape: Expanding the Scenery Elana Shohamy and Durk Gorter eds. Introduction Elana Shohamy and Durk Gorter Part I: Theoretical Perspectives Linguistic Landscaping and the Seed of the Public Sphere Florian Coulmas, Prolegomena to a Sociolinguistic Theory of Public Signage Bernard Spolsky A Sociological Approach to the Study of Linguistic Landscapes Eliezer Ben-Rafael Language Economy and Linguistic Landscape Jasone Cenoz and Durk Go…
Achievement of immigrant students in mathematics and academic Hebrew in Israeli school
Linguistic Landscape as Symbolic Construction of the Public Space
Linguistic landscape (LL) refers to linguistic objects that mark the public space. This paper compares patterns of LL in a variety of homogeneous and mixed Israeli cities, and in East Jerusalem. The groups studied were Israeli Jews, Palestinian Israelis and non-Israeli Palestinians from East Jerusalem, of whom most are not Israeli citizens. The study focused on the degree of visibility on private and public signs of the three major languages of I…
Language tests and human rights
Language policy as experiences
Personal experiences have rarely been viewed as part of the domain of language policy, since policies are generally created from the top down, often to meet ideological or political agendas. The study of linguistic practices in a small country like Luxembourg offers particular opportunities to consider how language policy needs also to be formulated from the bottom up, since it has a direct effect on the rights and opportunities of often marginal…
Language Policy and Language Assessment
In the past decade, major attention has been given to the power of tests and to the pivotal roles tests play in societies in shaping the definitions of language, affecting learning and teaching, an
Asymmetries and inequalities in the teaching of Arabic and Hebrew in the Israeli educational system
The aim of this comparative study is to detect symmetries and asymmetries in the status of two major languages taught in Israel: Hebrew in Arabic-medium schools and Arabic in Hebrew-medium schools. The teaching of these two languages offers a unique case of language education policy where categories of ideology, policy, curriculum, methods, and assessment intersect. For Arabs, Hebrew is perceived as a major tool for upward mobility, but findings …
The discourse of language testing as a tool for shaping national, global, and transnational identities
While much of the work in language testing is concerned with constructing quality tests in order to measure language knowledge in reliable and valid ways, there has been a significant movement in language testing research that examines tests in the context of their use in education and society. This line of research exits from the notion that tests are not isolated events but rather powerful societal tools that are both driven by, and have impact…
Reflections on Research Guidelines, Categories, and Responsibility
N The guidelines for quantitative and qualitative research, published in TESOL Quarterly, are comprehensive, detailed, informative, and broad in scope. They present a variety of research designs and approaches, especially regarding qualitative research. They are useful for planning research, writing up research articles and reports, and reading research critically. At the same time, however, the guidelines raise a number of questions: Does the fi…
Factors Predicting Success in EFL Among Culturally Different Learners
The paper reports on a multivariate study that examined the contribution of two independent variables-cognitive / academic proficiency in Ll and attitudes and motivation toward English as a foreign language-on success in English as a foreign language of two culturally different learners, one identified as a socio-culturally disadvantaged group and the other as a "regular" group. A description of the development of the instruments used to measure …
Language Testing Priorities
Critical Language Testing, Multilingualism and Social Justice
The paper reports on trends in language testing taking place over the years and aim at critical perspectives of testing and promoting inclusion, equity and justice. It begins with critical theories by Messick, Foucault and Bourdieu, leading to critical language testing (CLT) which focused on consequences and uses of tests. Given the power of tests and their detrimental effects questions were raised regarding the impact of language tests on indivi…
The Stability of Oral Proficiency Assessment on the Oral Interview Testing Procedures
The paper first discusses the complexity of measuring oral proficiency in communicative situations. The difficulty is due to the large number of variables, linguistic and social, which interact with one another. It then reports on a study which examined the stability of the assessment of oral proficiency on the oral interview test. Students of Hebrew as a foreign language underwent four administrations of different versions of that test. The admi…
Language Teachers as Partners in Crafting Educational Language Policies
The paper presents an expanded view of language policy which incorporates a variety of policy mechanisms which are claimed to affect de facto language policies. These mechanisms include declared policies, language education documents, language tests and language in public space, among others. These policies are initiated and determined by ''policy bodies'' which are part of governments and other groups in authority, but are detached from those wh…
Language in Israeli society and education
Depending on their language ideologies, countries are likely to develop different concerns for language-education policy. Countries with a monolingual ideology, which may ignore the multilingual reality, will be concerned with correctness and normativism. A country that recognizes two or three languages as equally important, or countries that recognize multilingual complexity, will need first to determine the status of each. While Israel is histo…
Rater Reliability of the Oral Interview Speaking Test
This paper reports results of a study which examined inter‐ and intra‐rater reliability of the Oral Interview test. Oral interviews were administered to one hundred six students of Hebrew at the University of Minnesota; the taped interviews were then graded independently by three trained raters. The results suggest that communicative tests such as the Oral Interview can be used reliably by decision‐makers in spite of their subjective nature
Invited colloquium on negotiating the complexities of multilingual assessment, Aaal Conference 2014
The invited colloquium on New Directions in Language Assessment held at the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) annual meeting in Portland, Oregon on March 22, 2014 brought together an international panel of scholars to together explore the possibilities and challenges of translanguaging and bi/multilingual approaches in assessment. Together, the presenters of this colloquium argued that allowing bi/multilinguals to demonstrate th…
The relationship between language testing and second language acquisition, revisited
Predicting Speaking Proficiency from Cloze Tests
Journal Article Predicting Speaking Proficiency from Cloze Tests: Theoretical and Practical Considerations for Tests Substitution Get access ELANA SHOHAMY ELANA SHOHAMY Stanford University/UC Berkeley Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Applied Linguistics, Volume III, Issue 2, Summer 1982, Pages 161–171, https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/III.2.161 Published: 01 July 1982 Article history Received: 01 September 19…
Predicting Speaking Proficiency from Cloze Tests
Rater Reliability of the Oral Interview Speaking Test
This paper reports results of a study which examined inter‐ and intra‐rater reliability of the Oral Interview test. Oral interviews were administered to one hundred six students of Hebrew at the University of Minnesota; the taped interviews were then graded independently by three trained raters. The results suggest that communicative tests such as the Oral Interview can be used reliably by decision‐makers in spite of their subjective nature
The Stability of Oral Proficiency Assessment on the Oral Interview Testing Procedures
The paper first discusses the complexity of measuring oral proficiency in communicative situations. The difficulty is due to the large number of variables, linguistic and social, which interact with one another. It then reports on a study which examined the stability of the assessment of oral proficiency on the oral interview test. Students of Hebrew as a foreign language underwent four administrations of different versions of that test. The admi…
Does the testing method make a difference? The case of reading comprehension
The paper reports results of a study which examined the effect that various methods used for testing reading comprehension have on the measurement of that trait. The methods investigated in this research were multiple-choice and open-ended questions, each presented in L1 and L2, on the same L2 texts. Results indicated that each of the testing methods produced different degrees of difficulty for the test takers, and that each of the variables - me…
Authentic language tests
In the first part of the paper the development of language tests towards authenticity is surveyed. The advantages and shortcomings of indirect vs direct (authentic) types are analysed. Whereas indirect tests were more efficient and lent themselves to psychometric analyses, they did not tap real-life language. On the other hand, direct tests based on real interactions aim at capturing real language and its variations in use. In the second part of …
Evaluation standards for the assessment of alternative testing methods
Language Testing Priorities
Factors Predicting Success in EFL Among Culturally Different Learners
The paper reports on a multivariate study that examined the contribution of two independent variables-cognitive / academic proficiency in Ll and attitudes and motivation toward English as a foreign language-on success in English as a foreign language of two culturally different learners, one identified as a socio-culturally disadvantaged group and the other as a "regular" group. A description of the development of the instruments used to measure …
Validation of listening comprehension tests
The paper reports on a study which investigated the effect of both texts and question types on test taker's scores on listening comprehension tests. Listening comprehension tests were administered to 150 EFL learners in their last year of secondary school. The listening stimuli consisted of three text types, a newsbroadcast, a lecturette, and a consultative dialogue, varying in the degree of oral features they contained. The consultative dialogue…
The validity of direct versus semi- direct oral tests
The article reports the results of a study which examined the validity of two oral language tests - one direct and one semi-direct. While concurrent validity of the two types of tests (as obtained via correlations in a number of earlier studies) was high, a variety of qualitative analyses indicated that the two tests differed in a number of aspects. Differences were found in the elicitation tasks (in the number and types of functions and topics) …
Test impact revisited
In countries with centralized educational systems national tests are used as primary devices through which changes in the educational system are introduced. This article examines the impact over time of two national tests which have been in operation for a number of years: one in Arabic as a second language (ASL) and one in English as a foreign language (EFL) through questionnaires, interviews and document analysis from a sample of teachers, stud…
Testing methods, testing consequences
Language tests employing methods which are not fair to all test takers are unethi cal. Equally, uses of language tests which aim to exercise control and manipulate stakeholders rather than provide information regarding proficiency levels are also unethical. Ways of reducing these sources of unfairness are discussed and language testers are urged to exercise vigilance at all times to ensure that the tests they develop are democratic and fair
Critical language testing and beyond
The test-takers' choice
A fundamental issue in validating topic-based tests of language proficiency is the effect of the topic on the test takers’ performance. Topic-based test developers must ensure that test takers are neither advantaged nor disadvantaged in terms of their test results when presented with a given test topic. We have termed this threat a ‘topic effect’ and argue that this topic effect may constitute a source of construct-irrelevant variance (Messick, 1…
Language in Israeli society and education
Depending on their language ideologies, countries are likely to develop different concerns for language-education policy. Countries with a monolingual ideology, which may ignore the multilingual reality, will be concerned with correctness and normativism. A country that recognizes two or three languages as equally important, or countries that recognize multilingual complexity, will need first to determine the status of each. While Israel is histo…
The relationship between language testing and second language acquisition, revisited
Democratic assessment as an alternative
The article describes the strong power of tests and the fact that tests lead to far-reaching and high-stakes decisions and consequences about individuals and groups. Further, there is evidence that tests are often introduced by those in authority as disciplinary tools, often in covert ways for the purpose of manipulating educational systems and for imposing the agendas of those in authority. Yet, such uses of tests as instruments of power violate…
Democratic assessment as an alternative
Reflections on Research Guidelines, Categories, and Responsibility
N The guidelines for quantitative and qualitative research, published in TESOL Quarterly, are comprehensive, detailed, informative, and broad in scope. They present a variety of research designs and approaches, especially regarding qualitative research. They are useful for planning research, writing up research articles and reports, and reading research critically. At the same time, however, the guidelines raise a number of questions: Does the fi…
Language Policy
Linguistic Landscape as Symbolic Construction of the Public Space
Linguistic landscape (LL) refers to linguistic objects that mark the public space. This paper compares patterns of LL in a variety of homogeneous and mixed Israeli cities, and in East Jerusalem. The groups studied were Israeli Jews, Palestinian Israelis and non-Israeli Palestinians from East Jerusalem, of whom most are not Israeli citizens. The study focused on the degree of visibility on private and public signs of the three major languages of I…
Reinterpreting Globalization in Multilingual Contexts
Response to Kanavillil Rajagopalan's review of Shohamy, 2006, Language Policy
Linguistic Landscape
Linguistic Landscape: Expanding the Scenery Elana Shohamy and Durk Gorter eds. Introduction Elana Shohamy and Durk Gorter Part I: Theoretical Perspectives Linguistic Landscaping and the Seed of the Public Sphere Florian Coulmas, Prolegomena to a Sociolinguistic Theory of Public Signage Bernard Spolsky A Sociological Approach to the Study of Linguistic Landscapes Eliezer Ben-Rafael Language Economy and Linguistic Landscape Jasone Cenoz and Durk Go…
Linguistics (34 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (29 works) · Psychology (28 works) · Sociology (23 works) · Pedagogy (20 works) · Political science (20 works) · EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning (19 works) · Mathematics education (19 works) · Second Language Learning and Teaching (19 works) · Computer Science (15 works)