Israel has two official languages: Hebrew and Arabic, and one semi-official language, English. Within this multilingual environment, the national English curriculum relates to all learners as one homogenous population. There are no specific directives regarding the linguistic needs of diverse language backgrounds. Studies of literacy acquisition…

This study examined whether the phonological awareness (PA) deficit in Arabic speaking dyslexic children could be impacted by the presence vs. absence of verbal working memory (WM) as function of the sensory modality of administration (auditory vs. visual) of the phonological tests. Three phonological awareness (PA) tasks, i.e., phoneme…

Purpose: Graphotactic regularities are statistical regularities governing orthographic systems that children are sensitive to from the start of their literacy learning. The current study observed changes in children's sensitivity to a set of graphotactic patterns across different grades in elementary school and measured the contribution of skills…

Purpose: We previously reported evidence of true double dissociation between reading accuracy and reading rate in a large unselected sample of Hebrew-speaking fourth graders and a large clinical sample of adult Hebrew-speakers with dyslexia. The present study aimed to replicate and extend these findings to Arabic, which is structurally similar to…

We examined the effects of an adaptive phonological training program on the enhancement of 3 processing abilities--namely, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, and phonological short-term memory--as well as word and pseudoword reading in Arabic-speaking children with dyslexia. We compared an experimental group (n = 20; mean age =…

We examined the effects of a combined phonological and print intervention program on the enhancement of phonological awareness, text reading accuracy and comprehension in fourth grade Arabic-speaking children with severe difficulties in reading accuracy (dyslexia) and reading comprehension. We compared an experimental group (n = 22; mean…

This study explored the role and extent of the involvement of morphological awareness (MA) in contrast to rapid automatized naming (RAN) in word reading and comprehension of Arabic as a morphologically based orthography. We gave measures of word reading, reading comprehension, MA, and RAN in addition to a nonverbal mental ability test to 3 groups…

In the present study, 144 second- and 150 fourth-grade Chinese students were recruited to complete a Chinese character learning task to explore the specific contributions of sensory-motor components (i.e., visual, motor, and haptic systems) of handwriting to Chinese character learning. After matching for age, nonverbal IQ, and a series of…

The Feuerstein Instrumental Enrichment (FIE) Program is a process-oriented program based on "Structural Cognitive Modifiability and Mediated Learning Experience" (SCM-MLE) theory. It is aimed at promoting learning how to learn, development of deficient cognitive functions, problem-solving strategies and metacognitive abilities. The FIE…

Word semantic knowledge (WSK) is crucial to the development of one's reading comprehension ability. A total of 608 students (208 poor readers in the experimental group and 200 poor readers in the control group one, and 200 typical readers in control group 2) from grade 4 participated in this study. Selected reading ability assessments were…

This study examined syntactic comprehension in French children with dyslexia in both listening and reading. In the first syntactic comprehension task, a partial version of the Epreuve de Comprehension syntaxico-semantique (ECOSSE test; French adaptation of Bishop's test for receptive grammar test) children with dyslexia performed at a lower level…

This study focused on the associations of general auditory processing, speech perception, phonological awareness and word reading in Cantonese-speaking children from Hong Kong learning to read both Chinese (first language [L1]) and English (second language [L2]). Children in Grades 2--4 ("N" = 133) participated and were administered…

A group of children with dyslexia (mean ages 9 and 14 years) was studied, together with group of children without dyslexia matched for age. Participants were monolingual native speakers of the Bosnian language with transparent orthography. In total, the diagnostic tests were performed with 41 children with dyslexia and 41 nondyslexic children. The…

The simple view of reading posits that reading comprehension can be decomposed into a print-specific component (concerning decoding and sight word reading) and a language comprehension component (concerning verbal and metalinguistic skills not related to print). One might properly consider lexical skills, indexed by vocabulary measures, part of…

The linked concepts of "scaffolding" and the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) were originally applied to the context of asymmetrical teaching and learning with a teacher or adult explicitly supporting a learner, usually a child, to achieve tasks beyond their ability when working alone. In this paper we investigate how these concepts…