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Cognitive, Language, and Literacy Development in Socio-culturally Vulnerable School Children – The Case of Ethiopian Israeli Children

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Current Issues in Bilingualism

Part of the book series: Literacy Studies ((LITS,volume 5))

Abstract

This chapter presents results of research that targeted the development of language and literacy skills in elementary level children whose parents immigrated to Israel from Ethiopia. The performance of Ethiopian Israeli children in grades 1, 2, 4, and 6 was compared to that of their classmates, whose families were not from an Ethiopian background. All participating schools were located in low SES neighborhoods. However, on various indices (for example, crowded living conditions, parental employment and literacy levels) the Ethiopian families were more destitute than the families of the non-Ethiopian children. In this chapter we examine cultural literacy, cognitive, linguistic, and literacy development across the grades, and compare the Ethiopian and Non-Ethiopian groups with regard to development on these dimensions. We also examine the extent to which the performance of the Ethiopian Israeli children can be better understood by considering their language and literacy resources in Amharic. Results indicate that there were either no gaps or the gaps disappeared on low level processing components such as phonemic awareness and decoding skills. However, the gaps between the groups persisted or increased on higher-level aspects of literacy that involve cultural knowledge, language skills and reading comprehension. Given this worrisome pattern, it is not surprising that Ethiopian children struggle with academic demands of high school. The results underscore the importance of providing early and consistent language and literacy enrichment to these children. Policy implications and implication for instruction are discussed.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Beginning in Grade 7, some schools offer weekly, 2–3 h of instruction in the home language (http://cms.education.gov.il).

  2. 2.

    The authors of this test do not report on reliability.

  3. 3.

    In Israel reading comprehension is not evaluated in Grade 1, and listening comprehension is evaluated instead.

  4. 4.

    We checked to see whether the increase in the gaps in Grade 6 relates to sampling issues – however, in Grade 6 the gap between Ethiopian and Non-Ethiopian samples on the Raven’s does not increase, and on some indices, such as phonological discrimination, the gap disappears.

  5. 5.

    In the present research there was no control group of middle class and we used national norms.

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Acknowledgements

The research reported in this paper was partially supported by a grant from the Ministry of Education, Chief Scientist’s Office, Israel.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Learning Disabilities, Faculty of Education, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel

    Michal Shany

  2. University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Esther Geva

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  1. Michal Shany
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  2. Esther Geva
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Correspondence to Michal Shany .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Education, Department of Learning Disabilities, University of Haifa, Haifa, 31905, Israel

    Mark Leikin

  2. , Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences,, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Be'er Sheva, 84105, Israel

    Mila Schwartz

  3. , Dept. of Foreign Literatures & Linguisti, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Be'er Sheva, 84105, Israel

    Yishai Tobin

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Shany, M., Geva, E. (2012). Cognitive, Language, and Literacy Development in Socio-culturally Vulnerable School Children – The Case of Ethiopian Israeli Children. In: Leikin, M., Schwartz, M., Tobin, Y. (eds) Current Issues in Bilingualism. Literacy Studies, vol 5. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2327-6_5

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