Bilingual teachers' language strategies: The case of an Arabic–Hebrew kindergarten in Israel

• We investigated the bilingual teaching strategies.
• The most frequently used strategy was translanguaging.
• The teachers' orientation was to avoid translation.
• The teachers aimed to increase Jewish children motivation to acquire Arabic.
• The study highlights the need to rethink traditional bilingual language strategies.

The goal of this study was to investigate the language-teaching strategies used in a bilingual Arabic–Hebrew kindergarten in Israel. We used an ethnographic approach by applying a mixed methods design. The results demonstrate that the language-teaching strategy most frequently used by teachers was flexible bilingualism, through translanguaging that involved code-switching. This is in contrast to traditional instruction using language separation. In the teachers' opinion, translanguaging enables bilingual children to learn their second language efficiently, especially since Arabic is a socially weaker language in Israel, and it encourages children's interactive involvement in the kindergarten.