About
Professor Salim Abu-Rabia is an Associate Professor Emeritus in the Department of Learning and Instructional Sciences and the Department of Special Education at the Faculty of Education, University of Haifa, Israel. He has held his position at Haifa since February 1999.
His research has profoundly shaped our understanding of how children and adults read Arabic — one of the world's most widely spoken languages and one with a uniquely complex orthographic system. His pioneering studies on the role of short vowels (diacritics), morphology, and diglossia in Arabic reading comprehension are foundational to the field of Arabic literacy.
Prof. Abu-Rabia is widely recognized as a leading international authority on dyslexia in Arabic and Hebrew, cross-linguistic transfer, and bilingual/multilingual reading development. His work spans Arabic, Hebrew, English, and Circassian-speaking communities, making his contributions uniquely comparative and globally significant.
He earned his Ph.D. from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto, Canada, and holds both his B.A. and M.A. from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel.