International Conference on Linguistic Research and Applications

Abstract
Recent research on reading development has underscored the positive relationship between oral language skills
and reading development (Saiegh-Haddad & Spolsky, 2014). Therefore, the goal of this paper is to illuminate
the dependency of reading on linguistic knowledge in diglossic societies, where the language or language variety
that is employed for daily interaction is not the formal written one (see e.g., Ferguson, 1959; Fishman, 1967;
Saiegh-Haddad, 2012). Such linguistic discrepancies between what is mainly acquired as the mother tongue and
used on a daily basis, and what is learned later through formal schooling, pose noteworthy challenges to literacy
development for learners in these societies. Consequently, this paper sheds light on insights from two special
contexts that have been commonly described as diglossic in the sociolinguistic literature: (1) the Arab region,
where multiple spoken varieties of Arabic coexist along with Modern Standard Arabic (the formal written
variety); and (2) Haiti, where the majority of the population speaks Haitian Creole on a daily basis and where
schooling, especially literacy instruction, occurs primarily in French. To this end, based on our empirical data
from both contexts, we compare and describe differences and similarities in the findings regarding the
relationship between linguistic knowledge and reading ability in the two diglossic contexts in the paper, identify
potential factors (linguistic, cognitive, and social/contextual) that alter the way in which linguistic knowledge
promotes reading ability and vice versa, and conclude with proposing a multilingual translanguaging perspective
(MacSwan, 2022) to support literacy development in such multilingual and multidialectal contexts.