Migration and acculturation: Identity and bilingual orientations of immigrant students from the former soviet union and ethiopia in Israel

Acculturation experiences of different migrant groups have been shown to vary as a function of such factors as their strength and status in the host society (Giles and Johnson, 1987) and the magnitude and character of their cultural divergence from the dominant host group, as manifested, for example, in racial, religious and cultural differences (Schwartz et al., 2006). Although the waves of immigration from the FSU and Ethiopia coincided temporally, Russian immigrants to Israel constituted a strong group demographically and their pride in their ethnic culture is apparent (Kheimets and Epstein, 2001), while the immigrants from Ethiopia constitute a small community with limited economic and socio-cultural resources. A theoretically-based model was used as a template to create 'fitted' models best describing the contributory impact of identity on language orientation for diverse ethnic communities within the broader theoretical framework of the migration process (Golan-Cook and Olshtain, 2011). The models derived through Structural Equations Modeling (SEM) for each of these immigrant groups in two independent studies are described in this chapter, allowing us to examine similarities and differences between the acculturation processes of students from these two ethnic communities in Israel.