Abstract

The relationship was investigated between the attitudes and cultural backgrounds of Israeli Arab students and their reading comprehension of Jewish and Arab stories. The participants were 210 Israeli Arab students in the 10th grade. An attitude questionnaire, Arab and Jewish stories, multiple-choice questions about each story, and a semantic differential test for evaluating the stories' characters were used. The students scored higher on reading comprehension of texts from their own (Arab) culture than of texts from the unfamiliar (Jewish) culture. The motivation of the Arab students to learn Hebrew was primarily instrumental rather than integrative. The participants evaluated Jewish characters and their roles more negatively than they evaluated Arab characters in both the Jewish and Arab stories.