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Multilingual Assessment Battery of Early Literacy

Publication

Abstract

The MABEL battery was developed over three years (2008 - 2011) as part of a large-scale, longitudinal, cross-linguistic study of early literacy development in English, French, Spanish, Czech and Slovak, within ELDEL (Enhancing Literacy Development in European Languages). The project was funded by Marie Curie - Initial Training Network, Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under Grant Agreement no. 215961.

The main goal of the project was to elucidate the core cognitive, linguistic, and environmental predictors of children's literacy development from kindergarten to the second grade. Five parallel studies were conducted, one in each country.

Currently, test materials are available in English, Spanish, Czech and Slovak, with French materials forthcoming. In addition, a Welsh language version of the battery has since been developed.

MABEL contains the most important and sensitive assessments of early literacy, as validated in each language of the ELDEL project. A unique feature of the MABEL battery is that each test was created to be parallel (directly comparable) across languages.

The skills assessed are: letter knowledge, phoneme awareness, and rapid naming, as well as reading and spelling. https://www.eldel-mabel.net/