Preface: Bernard Spolsky, Bar-Ilan University, Israel.- Part One: Language and Literacy Acquisition in Diglossic Contexts.- Part Two: Language and Literacy Acquisition in Standard-with-Dialect Contexts.- Part Three: Language and Literacy Acquisition in Multilectal Africa.
Elinor E. Saiegh-Haddad, PhD, Professor of Linguistics at the
English Literature and Linguistics Department, Bar-Ilan University,
Israel. She completed her graduate studies at Reading University,
England (MA) and Bar-Ilan University, Israel (PhD). In her graduate
work she focused on assessment of reading in L1 and in L2. She
conducted her postdoctoral research at OISE, University of Toronto,
Canada, where she investigated reading development in bilingual
English-Arabic children. Since then, she has engaged in intensive
research on the acquisition of reading in Arabic and specifically
on the role of diglossia laying down the theoretical foundations
and the methodological grounds of this new field of research. She
has published numerous research articles and book chapters on this
topic and has co-edited (with Malt Joshi) the first Handbook of
Arabic Literacy entitled “Handbook of Arabic Literacy: Insights and
Perspectives” (Springer 2014). Saiegh-Haddad has also been
activelyinvolved in curriculum development and educational
materials writing for Arabic native speaking children. She is
advisor to the Israel Ministry of Education and the National
Authority for Testing and Evaluation, as well as the Israel Centre
for Educational Technology. She is a member of the editorial boards
of leading journals in the field of language and reading
development such as Scientific Studies of
Reading, Reading & Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and
Applied Psycholinguistics.
Catherine McBride, Ph.D. is the Choh-Ming Li Professor of
Psychology at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is a
developmental psychologist who focuses on reading development and
impairment across languages, scripts, and cultures. McBride has
published two single authored books on literacy and has co-edited
three other volumes. She has served as president of two
international organizations, namely, the Society for the Scientific
Study of Reading and the Association of Reading and Writing in
Asia. She also designed a massive open online course (MOOC) with
NGO World Learning entitled "Teaching Struggling Readers around the
World," which was viewed by over 10,000 people across 100
countries.
Dr. Lior Laks, PhD, is a senior lecturer of Linguistics at the
Department of English Literature and Linguistics, Bar-Ilan
University, Israel. He graduated from Tel-Aviv University, where he
completed his doctoral dissertation entitled "Morpho-phonological
and morpho-thematic relations in Hebrew and Arabic verb formation",
under the supervision of Prof. Outi-Bat-El and Prof. Tal Siloni. He
joined Bar-Ilan University in 2011. Dr. Laks specializes in
morphology and its interface with other components of the grammar:
phonology, semantics and syntax. He examines word formation
processes while relating to different types of criteria that play a
role is the selection of morphological forms, productivity of word
formation and the absence of possible words that conceptually could
be formed. His studies also focus on language contact, variation
and change. Dr. Laks also works on diglossia in Arabic and the
grammatical differences between Modern Standard and Colloquial
Arabic and the effects of diglossia on language development and
change, as an issue with a first degree importance in the system of
education. Dr. Laks was a visiting researcher in The ATILF
Scientific Institute ("Analyse et Traitements Informatiques de la
Langue Française", UMR 7118), and University of Lorraine, Nancy,
France, as part of the Chateaubriand Fellowship Program of the
French Embassy in Israel, where he in engaged in a research project
entitled "A cross-linguistic comparison of word formation in
Romance and Semitic languages".
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