Esther L Raizen

Yours Truly Esther L Raizen

Yours Truly: Hebrew from the Heart of Texas is a set of listening-comprehension units, intended for use with students at the college level. At the University of Texas at Austin, these units are delivered over the course of two semesters at the end of which all students are expected to function at the intermediate-low level of proficiency as defined by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL), and some may function at higher levels. The book is structured in twenty units, each offering an episode from the lives of two fictional University of Texas students: Ruth, who grew up in Israel and came to the US with her parents, and Yoni, an American who studied Hebrew in Israel and in the US. An elaborate set of interactive online exercises complements each one of the units, augmenting the written exercises included in the book itself.



The exercises of Yours Truly provide pre- and post-listening activities at the age-appropriate level, allowing students' life experiences to become the center of class conversations and all other activities. Some of the exercises are designed with the goal of utilizing higher-order thinking skills, and others, supported by the book's rich illustrations, rely on the visual literacy that today's students bring into the instructional environment.



All Yours Truly units are posted in PDF and MP3 formats as open-access materials. The texts, sound files and links to exercises and related vocabulary games (flashcards, matching, and concentration) are available at http: //laits.utexas.edu/hebrew/yours-truly.