Handbook of Literacy in Diglossia and in Dialectal Contexts

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