Abstract
The Handbook of literacy in diglossia and in dialectal contexts originates from a conference organized in 2018 by Elinor Saiegh-Haddad and Lior Laks at Bar-Ilan University, where researchers from across the world convened to share their work on literacy development in contexts in which children speak a linguistic variety that differs from the language of schooling.
This handbook includes studies that were presented at this conference, as well as several additional chapters focusing on different languages. This has resulted in a broad collection of studies that approach the multi-faceted topic of literacy in diglossic and dialectal contexts from various angles, offering insights from different regions in the world, including North America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.
The volume starts with a thought-provoking contribution by emeritus professor Bernard Spolsky. Taking a historical perspective, he argues that the success of the implementation of literacy programs in a vernacular greatly depends both on the functional role that literacy plays in the everyday life of speakers and on the linguistic distance between the language that children speak and the written variety they are supposed to learn.
The rest of the book consists of 19 chapters, divided in 3 sections. Section I considers the relation between dialects and literacy acquisition, presenting both theoretical and empirical insights. The first chapter, by Julie Washington and Mark Seidenberg, discusses the language and literacy development of children speaking African American English, providing a clear overview of the current literature and inspiring directions for future research. Rather than taking a deficit-based perspective, in which speaking a non-standard variety is considered a risk factor, the authors argue that future studies should take a life-span developmental approach and shift their attention to children’s abilities as learners and the potential use of African American English to enhance educational outcomes. The second chapter, by Agnieszka Stepkowska, offers a sociolinguistic description of the unique diglossic context of German-speaking Switzerland, and how this affects literacy. Whereas Swiss-German dialects are spoken in any type of formal and informal setting, enjoying high prestige as a symbol of ‘Swissness’, Swiss Standard German is used almost exclusively for reading and writing and often not fully mastered. A very different diglossic context is discussed by Stavroula Tsiplakou, Maria Kambanaros, and Kleanthes Grohmann, who focus on diglossia and language contact between Cypriot Greek and Standard Greek in the Republic of Cyprus. The authors argue that even though the use of Cypriot Greek in schools is discouraged, the dialect still enters the classroom as teachers and students engage in code switching, which might lead to the emergence of a new variety called Standard Cypriot Greek. Two chapters further examine literacy acquisition in contexts of diglossia, addressing the issue of linguistic distance. First, Leo Man-Lit Cheang and Catherine McBride compare children speaking Mandarin in Beijing, whose oral language closely resembles the written variety, to children speaking Cantonese in Hong Kong, who are faced with a linguistic mismatch between the oral and the written variety. Second, focusing on reading acquisition in Arabic, Elinor Saiegh-Haddad underlines the importance of giving diglossia a more central role in research on reading development in Arabic, as well as in reading instruction and language assessment and intervention. Another particularly innovative contribution is provided by Natalia Rakhlin and Elena Grigorenko, who examine the effect of linguistic diversity on literacy rates across the world, while controlling for economic wealth. They conclude that obtaining universal literacy is a more complex task in linguistically diverse societies, and they emphasize the importance of maintaining and valuing local languages to support bilingualism and biliteracy.
Section II consists of a selection of neurophysiological and behavioral studies on the effect of diglossia on language and literacy learning. Focusing on Swiss German dialects and Standard German, Jessica Bühler and Urs Maurer investigate the impact of dialect use on literacy-related skills at different ages. They tested the influence of vocabulary and pronunciation differences on semantic processing at the neural level and whether such neural markers can be used as a predictor of reading skills. Three other chapters consider different aspects of literacy in Arabic. First, Asaid Khateb and Raphiq Ibrahim present a series of EEG experiments testing the cognitive status of Spoken Arabic and Standard Arabic. The results suggest that literate native speakers of Arabic effectively operate as if they had two native languages: one in the auditory modality and one in the visual written modality. Second, Lior Laks and Elinor Saeigh-Haddad investigate the distinction between variety and modality in Arabic diglossia, by examining the use of case markers and verbal patterns in narratives and expository texts produced by adults and children in Spoken Arabic and in Standard Arabic in both speaking and writing. Third, Aula Khatteb Abu-Liel, Raphiq Ibrahim, Bracha Nir, and Zohar Eviatar turn their attention to Arabizi, which refers to the use of the Latin alphabet to write Spoken Arabic in computer-mediated communication. They investigate current practices and attitudes regarding Arabizi and Standard Arabic, as well as adolescents’ reading skills in Arabizi compared to vowelized and unvowelized Arabic orthography. In addition, two chapters delve into the relation between dialect use and literacy outcomes: Leonie Cornips, Jetske Klatter-Folmer, Trudie Schils, and Romy Roumans compare the spelling and reading skills of monolingual and Limburgish bidialectal primary school children in the Netherlands, while Malikka Habib, Nur Artika Arshad, and Beth Ann O’Brien examine children’s spelling skills in relation to dialect use among speakers of Malay and Tamil in Singapore.
Section III features studies on language and literacy development in specific populations, considering assessment and instruction. Two of these chapters focus on heritage speakers. First, Abdulkafi Albirini and Elabbas Benmamoun examine literacy acquisition in heritage speakers of Arabic in the United States, which is marked by limited exposure to the written variety, resulting in language attrition and loss of certain grammatical structures. Second, Chilla Solveig presents a study on the assessment of developmental language disorder in child heritage speakers of Turkish in Germany, showing that linguistic differences between the dialects spoken by these children and Standard Turkish may render sentence repetition tasks unsuitable as a diagnostic tool for this population. In their chapter on the impact of dialect use on language assessment in African American English-speaking children, Ryan Lee James and Lakeisha Johnson also focus on the challenge of assessing language disorders in children who grow up speaking a non-standard variety. They discuss the overlap between clinical markers of language disorders, the linguistic profile of children growing up in poverty, and certain features of African American English, providing evidence-based recommendations on how to address this challenge. Furthermore, Rama Novogrodsky and Nardeen Maalouf-Zraik investigate the linguistic development in Spoken and Standard Arabic in Palestinian children with hearing impairment, in comparison to hearing peers. Another interesting contribution is provided by Reem Khamis-Dakwar, Karen Froud, Carly Tubbs Dolan, and Clay Westrope, who investigate the relation between Arabic-speaking Syrian refugee children’s explicit awareness of diglossia and their literacy and numeracy skills, using data from the Syria Holistic Assessment for Learning. Finally, Brandy Gatlin-Nash and Nicole Patton Terry present a pilot study in which they contrast different instructional approaches for children who speak non-mainstream American English, comparing contrastive analysis of standard versus dialectal forms to a teaching method that targets metalinguistic awareness.
Overall, this volume provides an impressive, multidisciplinary collection of studies that investigate literacy development in diglossia and dialectal contexts. Focusing on a wide variety of populations, numerous languages spoken in different regions across the world, and using various methodological approaches, the volume addresses important theoretical and applied questions at the intersection of sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics. By crossing both (sub-)disciplinary and regional boundaries, The Handbook of literacy in diglossia and in dialectal contexts is a valuable source for anyone who wishes to improve their understanding of the various facets of the complex relation between dialects, diglossia, and literacy.