Today, many children worldwide grow up in bilingual or multilingual families. This study explores early literacy development in Russian-Hebrew bilingual families in Israel. It studies the contribution of the home literacy environment (HLE), the language of communication, and the nature of the maternal writing support in Hebrew and Russian, to…

Mountain Jewish immigrants to Israel from the Eastern Caucasus used two heritage languages, Juhuri (Judeo-Tat) and Russian. Juhuri was their home and Russian the societal languages prior to migration. In Israel, Juhuri and Russian are Heritage Languages and Hebrew is the societal language. The present study reports on frequency of use and…

This study examines the role of age of arrival (AoA) in immigrant students' perceived multilingual proficiency. Additionally, the study investigates the demographic, linguistic and social-psychological variables distinguishing young-arriving immigrants from their middle and older-arriving peers. The sample included 274 eleventh grade Russian (L1)…

Purpose: We examined the role of narrative microstructure (production of words and sentences) and narrative macrostructure (organization of events) in the use of internal state terms (ISTs) in narratives of bilingual children with developmental language disorder (DLD) in their school language (SL). Method: Fifty-eight Russian-Hebrew bilingual…

The present research analyzes causal relations between events in the narratives of bilingual preschool children with typical development (BiTD) and with developmental language disorder (BiDLD). The analyses focused on story grammar elements (attempts and goals) and mental state terms between events in Enabling relations as features contributing to…

The war in Ukraine, which began on February 24, 2022, has led to a significant civilian involvement in Israel, particularly among immigrants from the former Soviet Union, who began to provide humanitarian assistance, including interpreting. Highlighting the interrelation between translation and migration, I argue that the war strongly affects…

Israel's population includes over a million Russian-speaking immigrants and more than 300,000 native English speakers. These groups differ in social integration and in the status of their heritage languages in Israel. We compared children's and parents' perceptions of children's identities, language abilities, and language preferences among…

The research on language dynamics in the context of migration and integration has been dominated by applied linguists and educators, who described and measured native language attrition and emerging bilingualism among immigrants and their children. In parallel, sociolinguists discussed the role of language ideology/policy of the host society and…

Purpose: Bilingual children often demonstrate a high rate of disfluencies, which might impact the diagnostic evaluation of fluency disorders; however, research on the rates and types of disfluencies in bilinguals' two languages is limited. The purpose of this research is to profile disfluencies of two types, stuttering-like disfluencies (SLDs) and…

Previous studies found that bilingual children and adults with typical language development (TLD) perform better than monolinguals in novel word learning, but show lower scores on lexical retrieval tasks (e.g., naming known words). Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) lack in their abilities in both tasks compared with children with…

This research examines the dominant language constellations (DLC) of multilingual, immigrant teacher trainees in Israel. The seven participants in this study from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) have resided in Israel for 2-4 years. This qualitative research, conducted through a narrative method, reveals that while they possess different language…

We examined factors determining parental success in transmitting heritage language (HL) and literacy in Russian-speaking migrant families of comparable socioeconomic status (SES) in Cyprus, Ireland, Israel and Sweden. A total of 345 Russian speakers completed a questionnaire about their language use and home language practices. Of those, we chose…

Notwithstanding the introduction of education multilingual policies worldwide, testing and assessment procedures still rely almost exclusively on the monolingual construct. This paper describes a study, part of a larger project fostering a new multilingual education policy in Israeli schools, exploring bi/multilingual assessment. It included two…