The needs of novice, non-native Hebrew readers are no different than the needs of novice readers of any language, including their native language. When children in kindergarten and first grade learn to read in their native language, their books are presented with a large font that discriminates easily among the letters, uses more white space between lines than in chapter books and often more white space between the words. This is done in order to give the young reader's eye a chance to isolate individual letters and words.

In contrast, the author has observed that many texts for novice Hebrew readers are not presented using these same simple principles. There seems to be an assumption (witting or unwitting) by some publishers that novice Hebrew readers, who have more proficient reading skills in their native language, have the same visual processing and decoding skills for discriminating small Hebrew font letters as in their native texts. The author's experience has shown the opposite to be the case when teaching most neuro-typical students and students with learning differences.

This paper will present a new method for formatting Hebrew texts for novice Hebrew readers to help mitigate problems with correct syllabification and phrasing. Using the macro language built into DavkaWriter 7 (a popular Hebrew word processing program), the author has created a series of macros (small computer programs) that automate much of the reformatting. This automation provides a quick way to create source texts for novice Hebrew readers in a variety of educational settings: B'nei Mitzvah training, prayer recitation practice, and study of Tanakh.

The author has successfully used reformatted texts to help students achieve Hebrew reading fluency and to increase their overall Hebrew reading speed and accuracy. Positive anecdotal feedback on these texts has been received from students, parents, teachers, colleagues and classmates. The ultimate goal of this reformatting standard is to provide a set of the most commonly used source texts (Torah portions, Haftarot, siddur texts) to the community at large. These texts have been used by neuro-typical learners and individuals of all ages with a variety of special needs, such as autism, dyslexia, memory impairments, executive functioning disorders and speed-of-information processing disorders.

In an effort to provide relevant theoretical background for this project, this paper will examine published research regarding native and second language reading skills when the second language has an orthography (alphabet) different from the native language. Particular attention will be paid to understanding the impact of teaching Hebrew decoding skills with minimal comprehension -- a fact for many congregational schools. The reality of limited practice time to achieve mastery with the new and unfamiliar orthography will be considered. For example, can such children be adequately prepared for B'nei Mitzvah, given that they have not yet consolidated all of the sound-symbol combinations of Hebrew?

Part of the discussion will center on visual processing. Hebrew can be a greater challenge than many other languages because not all of the graphemes - the smallest meaningful contrastive units in a writing system - are written laterally (on the same horizontal baseline) as they are in English. Hebrew consonants are written next to each other on the same horizontal baseline. Diacritical marks to express vowels, grammatical aids and pronunciation aids are written either under, next to or over the consonants. In some cases a mark can indicate both grammar and syllabic stress information.

These differences from English can create difficulty in correct vocalization and syllabification of the text for individuals who have trouble processing sound-symbol associations. Moreover, Hebrew contains phonemes - the basic distinctive units of speech sound - not found in English (such as sound of chet (ח), khaf (כ, ך) and tzadi (צ) when it initiates a syllable), which can add another layer of complexity.

It is often the case that a student learns to read Hebrew (or remediates their Hebrew reading skills) as part of their B'nei Mitzvah training, which typically begins six to nine months prior to their celebration, in weekly hour or half-hour long lessons. In this situation, there is only one direct route to reading Hebrew, namely decoding, with little to no significant lexical development. In other words, a student can sound out the words, but has no idea what the words mean. The student is not likely to learn the meanings of most of the Hebrew words they need to pronounce in their prayers and Torah/Haftarah texts. The limited amount of teaching time is devoted primarily to reviewing their latest assignment in Hebrew decoding and cantillation (the musical system for chanting Biblical text). For individuals with neurologically-based dyslexia, the emphasis on decoding an unfamiliar orthography without the associated cognitive context can lengthen the time to vocal fluency, as well as reduce the amount of text the student can master.