Literacy acquisition in Arabic diglossia: findings and implications

UCL IOE Centre for Language, Literacy and Numeracy: Research and Practice is delighted to be hosting Professor Elinor Saiegh-Haddad, who will be presenting her research on Literacy acquisition in Arabic diglossia: Psycholinguistic findings and educational implications, followed by a drinks reception.

This event will be of interest to researchers, teachers, practitioners and those interested in Education within the Arab region.

This is a hybrid event. Attendees can join in person or online. Please select the appropriate ticket type when registering.

Read on for more details about the event and the speaker.

Literacy acquisition in Arabic diglossia: Psycholinguistic findings and educational implications.

Arabic is a typical case of diglossia (Ferguson, 1959, Albirini, 2016). All native Arabic-speakers grow up in a sociolinguistic context in which different varieties of the same language are used within the same speech community for complementary sets of functions: a spoken variety/ies (referred to using the hypernym ‘Spoken Arabic, SpA’ or ‘Colloquial Arabic’) for everyday speech and a standard, rather uniform variety (Modern Standard Arabic, MSA, StA) for formal language functions and for reading/writing. Two important features characterize diglossia in Arabic: 1) a remarkable linguistic distance between the spoken varieties and MSA; 2) limited exposure and use of the standard. The talk will be divided into three parts. In the first part, we will present data showing that the linguistic distance between the spoken and the standard varieties impacts the quality of linguistic representations in the lexicons of children, phonological processing in memory, phonological and morphological awareness, and StA word reading (for a review, see Saiegh-Haddad, 2022). In the second part, we will share data from two recent studies testing the inter-dependence between skills in SpA and StA. In the third part, we will discuss the educational implications of the findings and describe a diglossia-centered multi-domain intervention program that was implemented with kindergarten children (Saiegh-Haddad, 2023; Saiegh-Haddad & Schiff, 2024). At the end, we will briefly describe BALLS: Basic Arabic Language and Literacy Skills battery that has been recently developed to identify kindergarten and first grade Arabic-speaking children at risk for language and literacy difficulties. The battery uses a web application and it will be available for use soon.

References:

Saiegh-Haddad, E. (2022). A psycholinguistic-developmental perspective on the role of diglossia in reading: Issues, methods, and findings in Arabic as a Testcase. In E. Saiegh-Haddad, Laks, L. & McBride, C. (Eds.), Handbook of Literacy in Diglossia and Dialectal Contexts: Psycholinguistic, Neurolinguistic and Educational Perspectives. Springer Nature (pp. 135-165).

Saiegh-Haddad, E. (2023). Embracing diglossia in early literacy education in Arabic: A pilot intervention study with kindergarten children. Oxford Review of Education, 49, 48-68.

Saiegh-Haddad & Schiff (2024). Diglossic and orthographic features of reading comprehension in Arabic. Reading Research Quarterly, 60, 1, https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.598.

About the speaker: Professor Elinor Saiegh-Haddad

Elinor Saiegh-Haddad is a Full Professor of Applied Linguistics at the English Literature and Linguistics Department, and the Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Centre, Bar-Ilan University. Saiegh-Haddad completed her graduate studies at Reading University, England (MA) and Bar-Ilan University, Israel (PhD). She conducted her postdoctoral research at OISE of the University of Toronto, where she investigated reading development in English-Arabic bilingual children. Saiegh-Haddad is a world expert on literacy acquisition in Arabic diglossia. She has laid the theoretical and methodological grounds for studying the psycholinguistics of diglossia and its consequences for language and literacy acquisition and development in children. She co-edited two volumes: “Handbook of Arabic Literacy” (Springer 2014) and “Handbook of Literacy in diglossia and in dialectal contexts” (Springer, 2022) and published over 70 research articles on the topic. Saiegh-Haddad has also been actively involved in curriculum development and textbook writing for the teaching of Arabic as the first language and English as a foreign language in Israel. She has led the development of various diagnostic reading batteries and intervention programs for young children in the two languages. Saiegh-Haddad is advisor to national and international bodies including the International Dyslexia Association (IDA) and the Israel Ministry of Education, and she serves on the editorial boards of leading journals in the field of language and literacy including Scientific Studies of Reading, Reading & Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research, and Applied Psycholinguistics. Saiegh-Haddad is a founding member of Bilingualism Matters Israel and the Israel Arabic Language Academy.

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