This study examined emergent literacy skills of 61 kindergarten children whose families had immigrated to Israel from a primarily oral society (Ethiopia). Three complementary perspectives were examined: developmental patterns, individual differences, and the contribution of parent literacy. The emergent literacy skills of children whose families were from Ethiopia were compared to those of 52 children coming from a primarily literate culture. The groups had acquired less complex Hebrew literacy skills in the same order, including phonological awareness, letter naming and consonant writing. However, the Ethiopian Israeli children were less proficient on various aspects of Hebrew language proficiency, and less familiar with aspects of cultural and environmental literacy. Most were also unable to speak or comprehend Amharic. In both groups, phonological awareness explained individual differences in letter naming, but vocabulary and syntactic knowledge added to the explained variance only in the Ethiopian Israeli group. Letter naming was associated with consonant writing in both groups. Hebrew oral and written language proficiency of Ethiopian Israeli mothers was positively correlated with literacy skills in their children. The results underscore the importance of distinguishing between less complex, modularized, aspects of emergent literacy and more complex literacy skills. Here the cumulative effects of poverty, oral home culture, parental inability to mediate language and literacy, and non-optimal conditions for becoming bilingual place young immigrant children at risk for academic failure early on.
2019. Deconstructing and reconstructing cross-language transfer in bilingual reading development: An interactive framework. Journal of Neurolinguistics 50 ► pp. 149 ff.
Dixon, L. Quentin & Shuang Wu
2014. Home language and literacy practices among immigrant second-language learners. Language Teaching 47:4 ► pp. 414 ff.
Feder, Liat & Salim Abu-Rabia
2020. An examination of differences in linguistic and meta-linguistic skills in English (FL) and Hebrew (L1): English intervention program for dyslexic, poor and normal readers. The Journal of Educational Research 113:3 ► pp. 226 ff.
Kasperski, Ronen & Vered Vaknin-Nusbaum
2022. Reading Self-Concept and Reading Comprehension: The Possible Effect of the Transition from Transparent to Deep Orthography. Reading Psychology 43:3-4 ► pp. 232 ff.
2017. Early literacy programme as support for immigrant children and as transfer to early numeracy. Early Child Development and Care 187:3-4 ► pp. 672 ff.
Kupzyk, Sara S., Brea M. Banks & Mindy R. Chadwell
2016. Collaborating with Refugee Families to Increase Early Literacy Opportunities: a Pilot Investigation. Contemporary School Psychology 20:3 ► pp. 205 ff.
Lin, Jiexin, Haomin Zhang & Xiaoyu Lin
2022. Prosodic Transfer in English Literacy Skills among Chinese Elementary-Age Students: Controlling for Non-Verbal Intelligence. Journal of Intelligence 10:4 ► pp. 114 ff.
2022. The advantages of jointly considering first and second language vocabulary skills among emergent bilingual children. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 25:1 ► pp. 42 ff.
Passig, David & Timor Schwartz
2014. Solving Conceptual and Perceptual Analogies with Virtual Reality among Kindergarten Children of Immigrant Families. Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education 116:2 ► pp. 1 ff.
Prevoo, Mariëlle J. L., Maike Malda, Judi Mesman & Marinus H. van IJzendoorn
2016. Within- and Cross-Language Relations Between Oral Language Proficiency and School Outcomes in Bilingual Children With an Immigrant Background. Review of Educational Research 86:1 ► pp. 237 ff.
Shany, Michal & Esther Geva
2012. Cognitive, Language, and Literacy Development in Socio-culturally Vulnerable School Children – The Case of Ethiopian Israeli Children. In Current Issues in Bilingualism, ► pp. 77 ff.
Slobodin, Ortal
2023. Beyond the language barrier: A systematic review of selective mutism in culturally and linguistically diverse children. Transcultural Psychiatry 60:2 ► pp. 313 ff.
2024. Selective mutism in immigrant families: An ecocultural perspective. Transcultural Psychiatry 61:1 ► pp. 15 ff.
Vaknin-Nusbaum, Vered & Michal Raveh
2019. Cultivating morphological awareness improves reading skills in fifth-grade Hebrew readers. The Journal of Educational Research 112:3 ► pp. 357 ff.
Vaknin‐Nusbaum, Vered
2021. Morphological Awareness: A Tool to Promote Reading Fluency and Accuracy in Hebrew in Students with Reading Disabilities. Learning Disabilities Research & Practice 36:1 ► pp. 26 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 15 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.