Handbook of Literacy in Diglossia and in Dialectal Contexts: Psycholinguistic, Neurolinguistic, and Educational Perspectives (Literacy Studies, 22, Band 22) - Hardcover

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".

A majority of literacy learners worldwide are taught to read and write in a language variety or a dialect that is not the same as their spoken language. Not only is this the global norm, but it is probably also the greatest obstacle to literacy learning. This volume is the first published collection of papers on therole of dialect in language and literacy acquisition, impairment, and education in a variety of languages and situations across Europe, the Middle East, North America, Africa, and Asia.The authors are pioneers in this field.