Bar-Ilan University appoints first Arab female full professor
Working in Bar-Ilan's Department of English Literature and Linguistics, Saiegh-Haddad's work specializes in developmental psycholinguistics and language acquisition.
By AARON REICHBar Ilan University's Institute for Nantechnology and Advanced Materials(photo credit: BAR ILAN UNIVERSITY)Bar-Ilan University has appointed Prof. Elinor Saiegh-Haddad as their first Arab female full professor.Saiegh-Haddad boasts a stellar resume as a former department chairwoman, distinguished scholar and experienced lecturer, and has become one of the very few Arab women to hold this position at Israeli universities. In addition, she also serves as a senior adviser to various organizations in Israel and around the world, such as UNESCO, the chief scientist in the Education Ministry, the National Authority for Measurement and Evaluation and the Center for Educational Technology. She is a member of the Arabic Language Academy, is the head of a number of committees and proceedings to develop curricula and to enable teachers to identify children with reading difficulties and to implement appropriate intervention, is on the editorial board of a number of international journals and is a mentor to graduate students at universities abroad.Working in Bar-Ilan's Department of English Literature and Linguistics, Saiegh-Haddad's work specializes in developmental psycholinguistics and language acquisition, especially on the impact linguistic distance of speech and print languages has on literacy acquisition.Much of her work has sought to answer specific questions, such as understanding the scope of language disparity between Standard Arabic and its many spoken dialects when seen through a developmental psycholinguistic lens, and how this affects a child's language and reading acquisition. It is topics such as this, as well as studying dyslexia and developmental language disorder in Arabic-speaking children, that particularly engage Saiegh-Haddad.Indeed, Saiegh-Haddad was actually the first scholar to attempt to quantify the linguistic difference between spoken and standard Arabic in children's vocabulary. This groundbreaking research is important for teaching the Arabic language as well as in attempting to diagnose reading and developmental language impairments in children, and has paved the way for further research on the subject.Having published numerous articles on the topic in several leading international academic journals as well as several reports and books, Saiegh-Haddad is now pushing forward with her research backed by several new research grants, including two from the Education Ministry. The first grant is for developing an early intervention program for Arabic-speaking preschool children and to train teachers in implementing the program with a thousand children in northern and central Israel. The second grant will allow her to examine how diglossia affects reading development. She has also been given grants from the Israel Science Foundation to examine how diglossia affects linguistic development through childhood into adulthood, as well as a similar grant from the Arabic Language Academy in Israel.Saiegh-Haddad has also recently submitted a large-scale research grant proposal to the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in order to track the role of diglossia in reading development in Arabic, as well as examine statistical and computational models alongside US researchers= to better understand the factors that govern reading success in Arabic.
