In 2009, Dr. Nina E. Goodman coordinated Academic Support at the Abraham Joshua Heschel Lower School in New York City and was also a teacher in its Judaic Studies resource room. Her Ph.D. dissertation thesis, "Word Reading Strategies: English-Speaking First-Graders Learning Hebrew as a Second Language" sought to determine how English-speaking first-graders employed word attack strategies to read Hebrew, which they were learning as a second language. Goodman studied seventeen first-graders in an English-Hebrew day school. The questions her dissertation sought to answer were: (p. 5)

1. What word-identification strategies are observable among first-grade students learning to read English (L1), and learning to speak and read Hebrew (L2), when they read each language?
   
   
2. What word-identification strategies used by first-grade students reading English (L1) and Hebrew (L2) are consistent with each language's orthographic structure?
   
   
3. Do first graders learning to read English (L1) and Hebrew (L2) decode both languages with similar accuracy and fluency?

This author does not usually use her specially formatted texts with this young a cohort, but rather with students who are learning Hebrew for the purposes of learning prayer recitation and chanting biblical texts for as part of their B'nei Mitzvah training. Goodman's third research question is relevant to this author's work as older students learning to read Hebrew through decoding and rote recitation strategies often show similar dysfluent decoding skills by sounding out words one syllable at a time.

Goodman contrasts English and Hebrew orthography (pp. 8-13). English has inconsistent, but rule-based spelling, making the reading task one of decoding known, but irregular combinations of letters or onset-rime consonant + vowel-consonant (C+VC) syllables. A single letter is the most accessible unit in print. "In Hebrew, while several phonemes may be represented by more than one grapheme (consonant), each grapheme only carries one possible sound." (p. 13) In general, Hebrew written with vowels (nekudot) is read in consonant-vowel (CV) or consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) combinations.

She concluded that the children in her study used "Hebrew's natural orthographic structure to help them sound out unfamiliar words." (p. 156) This result supports this author's anecdotal findings and influenced some of the design decisions of this author's text formatting standard.