Professor Elinor Saiegh-Haddad FBA

Summary

Elinor E. Saiegh-Haddad is a Palestinian Arab citizen of Israel. She has been educated at Bar-Ilan University (Israel), Reading University (UK) and the University of Toronto (Canada). Saiegh-Haddad is Full Professor of Applied Linguistics in the Department of English Literature and Linguistics at Bar-Ilan University, and at the Arab Academic College of Education in Haifa. She is a CWR Research Fellow at the University of California, Irvine (USA). Prof. Saiegh-Haddad is the recipient of the Humboldt Research Award (2026) and the International Reading Association Literacy Research Award (2003) and has been ranked among the world's top two per cent of scientists in the Elsevier–Stanford University ranking (2020–2025).

Saiegh-Haddad is an internationally recognized expert on literacy acquisition in bidialectal contexts, with a particular focus on Arabic diglossia. She pioneered the theoretical and methodological foundations for investigating the psycholinguistics of diglossia and has been testing the role of diglossia for language and literacy development in Arabic native speakers for over 20 years and published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on this topic, including two landmark Handbooks: 'Handbook of Arabic Literacy' (2014) and 'Handbook of Literacy in Diglossia and in Dialectal Contexts' (2022).

More recently, her research has focused on developing evidence-based early literacy intervention programs for Arabic-speaking children in preschool and the early grades and normed assessment tools for the diagnosis of children with atypical language development.

In addition to her research, she has played a leading role in the development of Arabic language curricula. She also serves as an advisor to national and international literacy organisations, including the International Dyslexia Association (IDA). Saiegh-Haddad is a founding member of the Arabic Language Academy in Haifa, Israel.