Bilingualism Matters opened in Ramat Gan, Israel in June 5th, 2018, hosted by Bar Ilan University.
Branch aims
Our branch plans to:
- Raise public awareness about multilingualism and multiculturalism in societal and educational contexts by providing information and advice for parents, educators, health providers and policymakers.
- Encourage development of tools for parents to maintain the home language and to raise the awareness of teachers and clinicians about the need to include the home language in assessment procedures and intervention plans.
- Influence state policy about multilingualism by promoting bilingualism in the education system, by encouraging employment of multilingual staff and interpreters in the health system and by developing and making available multilingual communal services.
Get in touch
Website: https://www.sharon-armon-lotem.com/bilingualism-matters
Email: BilingualismMatters.biu.il@gmail.com
Facebook: BilingualismMattersIsrael
Israel team

Prof. Sharon Armon-LotemBranch Director

Dr. Carmit Altman
Deputy Director
Carmit Altman’s research deals with language development in preschool bilingual children with and without impairment. She works on assessment tools for screening children’s early language development, including assessment of narrative abilities and their relation to sociolinguistic identity. Her research is currently funded by the Israel Science Foundation (ISF 863/14) and the Israel Ministry of Education. Her publications have appeared in Applied Psycholinguistics, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development and the Journal of Communication Disorders. She is affiliated with the Child Development and School Counseling Programs in the School of Education at Bar Ilan University.

Dr. Carmit AltmanDeputy Director

Mrs. Hadar Oz-Abutbul
Dissemination Coordinator
<strong>Hadar Oz-Abutbul</strong> is a Speech and Language Therapist, clinic manager, a PhD student, and a research assistant at Bar Ilan University. Her main interests focus on differentiating bilingual children with and without DLD, DLD diagnosis and treatment. She is the initiator and promoter of Theoretical and Practical workshops for SLP's, educational and health care staff dealing with linguistic profile, and diagnosis and treatment of bilingual children.

Mrs. Hadar Oz-AbutbulDissemination Coordinator

Prof. Elinor Saiegh-Haddad
Elinor Saiegh-Haddad is a professor of Linguistics. In her graduate work she focused on assessment of reading in L1 and L2. In her postdoctoral research at OISE, University of Toronto, Canada, she investigated reading development in bilingual English-Arabic children. Since then she has engaged in intensive research on the development of reading in bi-dialectal and bilingual contexts, particularly on reading development in Arabic and on the role of diglossia. Prof. Saiegh-Haddad has also been actively involved in curriculum development and textbook writing for Arabic as the first language and English as a foreign language in Israel and has led the development of two reading development diagnostic kits in the two languages. She is advisor to the Israel Ministry of Education and the National Authority for Testing and Evaluation, as well as the Israel Centre for Educational Technology.

Prof. Elinor Saiegh-Haddad

Dr. Michal Ben Shachar
Michal Ben-Shachar is the head of the Neurolinguistics Lab at the Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center in Bar-Ilan University. Her lab studies the neural systems that underlie language and reading, in typical and atypical populations, using diffusion MRI, functional MRI and cognitive measurements. Her ongoing research on the neural basis of speech production in adults with and without developmental stuttering is funded by the Israel Science Foundation. Dr. Ben-Shachar’s lab further studies the neural pathways that underlie morphological processing in Hebrew and English. Dr. Ben-Shachar is a board member and the current Chair of the Program Committee of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language.

Dr. Michal Ben Shachar

Prof. Joel Walters
<strong>Joel Walters’</strong> research in bilingualism spans both sociopragmatics and psycholinguistics. His present work examines narratives and social identity in a variety of contexts, including bilingual children with typical language development and SLI, bilingual adults recovering from aphasia and narrative intervention with children of refugees, asylum seekers and labor migrants. His research has been funded by the Israel Science Foundation, the German-Israel Research Foundation (GIF), the German Ministry of Education (BMBF) and the Israel Ministry of Education. He is Professor Emeritus from Bar-Ilan University and currently Chair of the Department of Communication Disorders at Hadassah Academic College in Jerusalem.

Prof. Joel Walters

Dr. Natalia Meir
Natalia Meir investigates language development in monolingual and bilingual children with typical and atypical language development (e.g., Specific Language Impairment (SLI), Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD), Hearing Impairments). Her studies focus on the development, maintenance and transmission of Russian as the Heritage Language in typical and atypical populations. Currently, she is investigating the effect of bilingualism on linguistic, cognitive and Theory of Mind abilities of children with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD). She is also involved in research on bimodal-bilingual children. She is a member of several European research networks: “Language Abilities in Children with Autism (LACA)” and COST Action IS01306 “New Speakers in a Multilingual Europe - Opportunities and Challenges.” (http://www.nspk.org.uk/). Natalia Meir is an active member of the Russian speaking community in Israel, she has strong contacts with networks of kindergartens and schools supporting education in the Russian Language.
