Research reveals that although the effect of diacritics--the symbols that tell the reader how to pronounce a letter--on reading and reading comprehension was examined in a series of studies, the influence of diacritics on listening comprehension, especially in the Arabic orthography, was not examined. Therefore, this study attempted to examine…

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…

English as a foreign language (EFL) literacy is necessary for the career success of non-English speaking students. Many students lack adequate EFL literacy skills which may indicate a gap between EFL literacy instruction theory and practice. Teachers' self-efficacy regarding their ability to teach reading and writing, years of teaching experience,…

The medium of instruction of most Israeli institutions of higher education is Hebrew. Although there are a number of institutions where the medium of instruction is Arabic, many students belonging to the Arab-speaking minority choose to study in Hebrew-medium institutions. Studying in a Hebrew-speaking institution, as such, raises several issues…

Listening comprehension (LC) is considered an important but complex skill that predicts later reading comprehension in various languages. In this study, we aimed at understanding the relationship of LC with different linguistic and cognitive components. For this purpose, 262 Arabic-speaking kindergartners participated in this study. Our regression…

This study investigated the mode of directness of requests and refusals and the background variables that explain this production in two trilingual populations in Israel (i.e. native speakers of Arabic for whom English is an L3, and Hebrew, an L2, and native speakers of Hebrew for whom English is an L2 and another language is their L3). Data were…

Creativity may be enhanced by contextual factors that contribute to a divergence from conventional and habitual modes of thought. Two studies tested the prediction that a foreign language (that is frequently associated with moving away from the routine experiences) will contribute to originality of solutions, compared to one's native language.…

Phonological and morphological awareness and its correlation with reading punctuated and non-punctuated words in Arabic as a first language were examined, as well as its transfer to Hebrew as a second language. Research participants were 30 fourth grade pupils. Phonological awareness was examined by phonological decoding of actual and meaningless…

This study focused on the role of bilingual versus monolingual preschool education in the development of lexical knowledge in Russian (L1) and Hebrew (L2) among second-generation Russian-Hebrew speaking immigrants in Israel. The study was designed as a longitudinal and comparative study. The lexical knowledge of children was measured three times…