Immigrants to Israel benefit from numerous organized efforts to help them learn Hebrew. “Absorption centers,” where immigrants live while sorting out their employment and housing arrangements, offer subsidized, on-site, intensive, six-month Hebrew classes. Other classes, intensive and nonintensive, are offered by municipalities for nominal fees. Universities offer special language courses for foreign students and for immigrant faculty and their spouses. When immigrant children go to school, they are offered classes in Hebrew as a second language, if there are enough children to form a class. Otherwise, children may be pulled out of their classes for a few hours of individual instruction per week. A weekly newspaper is published in simplified Hebrew, the news is broadcast daily in simplified (and slower) Hebrew, and Hebrew literature is translated into simplified Hebrew. A television series in simplified Hebrew, produced in the 1970s, is rebroadcast from time to time. All of these programs and devices exemplify acquisition planning, which refers to organized efforts to promote the learning of a language.

Other examples of acquisition planning abound:

To improve the Korean-language skills of Korean-Americans, the University of California at Los Angeles began, in 1987, a program whereby its Korean-American students could travel to Seoul National University for ten weeks of Korean-language study.

To facilitate the acquisition of Russian by non-Russian nationalities in the Soviet Union, Soviet language planners have imposed the Cyrillic script on most of the Soviet minority languages and use Russian models to modernize the vocabularies of these languages.