Grammatical Awareness Across Languages and the Role of Social Context: Evidence from English and Hebrew

Abstract

Handbooks offer invaluable contributions to novices as well as to experts in a domain. A review of research is always handy to the expert and is a way into expertise for a novice. Handbooks may have a more specific focus: handbooks and useful collections have been compiled on word spelling, dyslexia, or reading acquisition in bilingual contexts. We felt that it was time to edit a handbook that allowed the multifaceted nature of children's literacy to come to the foreground. By including such different sections as non-normative literacy learning and looking across languages, basic processes in word reading and text comprehension, and by looking at language instruction across time, we wish to make it salient that children's literacy is a phenomenon that must be investigated from a variety of perspectives, with diverse methods and in order to answer different questions. No single method, no isolated theory, no unique educational input can be expected to explain children's literacy. The variety and creativity of methods for investigating children's reading and writing increased considerably in the second half of the last century. This variety is represented in the Handbook, where readers will come across experiments using a diversity of measures, predictive studies, qualitative analyses of children's performance, intervention studies, and investigations of the social and historical contexts for the teaching of literacy. The editors who contributed to the organisation of the Handbook ensured that their sections offer this refreshing breadth of coverage of methods so that no generalisations about the elephant are made from exploring only its tail.