Elinor E. Saiegh-Haddad, PhD, Professor of Linguistics at the English Literature and Linguistics Department, Bar-Ilan University, Israel. She completed her graduate studies at Reading University, England (MA) and Bar-Ilan University, Israel (PhD). In her graduate work she focused on assessment of reading in L1 and in L2. She conducted her postdoctoral research at OISE, University of Toronto, Canada, where she investigated reading development in bilingual English-Arabic children. Since then, she has engaged in intensive research on the acquisition of reading in Arabic and specifically on the role of diglossia laying down the theoretical foundations and the methodological grounds of this new field of research. She has published numerous research articles and book chapters on this topic and has co-edited (with Malt Joshi) the first Handbook of Arabic Literacy entitled “Handbook of Arabic Literacy: Insights and Perspectives” (Springer 2014). Saiegh-Haddad has also been activelyinvolved in curriculum development and educational materials writing for Arabic native speaking children. She is advisor to the Israel Ministry of Education and the National Authority for Testing and Evaluation, as well as the Israel Centre for Educational Technology. She is a member of the editorial boards of leading journals in the field of language and reading development such as Scientific Studies of Reading, Reading & Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and Applied Psycholinguistics.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".
