Phonological awareness may be influenced by differences in the characteristics of the items studied. This hypothesis is considered particularly applicable to Arabic, which is a diglossic language. This study examined the impact of phonemic position and the affiliation of the items between spoken and standard languages on phonemic isolation tasks.…

The current study followed literacy skills development amongst 79 Arabic native speaking pupils from kindergarten to fourth grade. Based on reading comprehension attainments in fourth grade, two groups of skilled and poor readers were identified. Poor readers showed significantly lower performance on measures of phonological and morphological…

This study aimed to study the association between diglossic reading skills and reading comprehension in first grade students with and without learning disabilities. In this study population, students presented diglossia in literary and colloquial Arabic: 30 first grade students with learning disabilities and 30 first grade students without…

The study focuses on the beliefs of Arabic-speaking mothers in Israel relating to early literacy, and the relations between their beliefs and their children's actual early literacy skills. Participants included 113 mothers and their 5-6-year-old preschool children. At the families' homes, mothers reported about the richness of the home literacy…

The study examined aspects of parent-child shared reading interactions of two Hebrew alphabet books, children's motivation to engage in early literacy activities, and how these variables relate to children's early literacy skills. Participants were 44 children (32 girls, 12 boys) aged 4.6 to 6.6 years (M = 5.6, SD = 0.54) and one parent (42…

The purpose of the current study was to examine whether morphological awareness measured before children are taught to read (Kindergarten in Israel) predicts reading accuracy and fluency in the middle of first grade, at the very beginning of the process of learning to read pointed Hebrew -- a highly transparent orthography, and whether this…

The effectiveness of an intervention program aimed at improving morphological awareness was evaluated in Hebrew-speaking poor readers in Grade 5. The 12-week intervention in small groups focused on learning morphological structure of words by identifying, decomposing, and constructing morphologically complex words. Results were compared with a…

Writing argumentative texts is a hallmark of literacy attainments with a long and laborious trajectory. The present study explored the incipient stages in argumentative texts written by 293 Hebrew-speaking Israeli children in second, third, fourth, and fifth grades. The literacy cognitive, transcriptional, linguistic, and reading abilities were…

Alphabet-boards are commonplace in lower grade classrooms in elementary-schools. If designed correctly, alphabet-boards can help internalize letters into memory. The purpose of this study was to examine alphabet-board characteristics that should be considered by teachers for providing a clear, readable, and applicable pedagogical tool. The…

The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a study of 15-year-old students' performance in reading, mathematics, and science literacy conducted every 3 years. The PISA 2018 results provide a global view of U.S. students' performance compared to their peers in nearly 80 countries and education systems. By design, PISA aims to…

We examined the response of high school students in Israel to biographical texts. Students were exposed to three sub-genres of biographical texts (a literary-biographical text, an autobiographical text and a scientific-biographical text). These texts all differ from the conceptual schema of ordinary school texts. The data were collected from 64…

Reading efficiently in a second language (L2) is a crucial skill, but it is not universally achieved. Here we ask whether L2 reading efficiency is better captured as a language specific skill or whether it is mostly shared across L1 and L2, relying on general language abilities. To this end, we examined word frequency and predictability effects in…

This research examined differences between dyslexic, poor and normal readers who learn in the same educational framework, across various linguistic and meta-linguistic skills in Hebrew as the first language (L1) and English as a foreign language (FL), following an intervention program focusing on English linguistic skills. The participants…

The homeschool framework differs significantly from the traditional school setting. Earlier research has shown differences between homeschooled and other children in language skills, but no study has examined how homeschooling is related to the acquisition of the different components of reading. The present research examined several reading…

PIRLS (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study) is the fourth assessment in the current trend series, following PIRLS 2001, 2006, and 2011. There were 61 participants in PIRLS 2016, including 50 countries and 11 benchmarking entities (e.g., regions of countries as well as additional grades or language groups from the participating…