Yonas Mesfun Asfaha

Multilingual education policy in practice: classroom literacy instruction in different scripts in Eritrea

This contribution compares literacy instruction in three different scripts in Eritrea. It uses data stemming from classroom observations of beginning readers of Tigrinya (Ge’ez script), Arabic (Arabic script) and Saho (Roman alphabet), the examination of teaching materials, and teacher interviews. Our analysis focuses on literacy events. We examine and compare the introduction of the written code in classrooms in the context of a single national curriculum and a national language policy that gives equal rights to all the languages involved. The practices that we observed in this study involved concentrated effort on teaching the children how to learn the letters of the specific orthography. In mostly phonics based lessons, teachers used chanting, games, reciting letters or syllable symbols and repeated exercises in the writing of letters that emphasized graphic form. These instructional practices differed for each language and were deeply embedded in the languages’ historical and cultural context.

Origin and development of multilingual education in Eritrea

In an attempt to describe the historical origins of multilingual education in Eritrea, Horn of Africa, this paper looks at how missionaries, European colonisers, successive Ethiopian rules in Eritrea and the independence movements that fought Ethiopia defined ethnic, religious and linguistic differences of communities in the country. These definitions of differences are then related to broader political aspirations of these forces and their specific education policies. Italian and Ethiopian rules, chiefly concerned with control and pacification of the territory, imposed Italian and Amharic languages, while missionaries, the British Military Administration and the 1950s government of autonomous Eritrea, despite their divergent interests, laid some ground for pluralistic language policies in the country. But it is the Eritrean Peoples Liberation Front, predecessor to the current government, sceptical of the policies of all these forces and charging them as divisive, that sought to de-politicise diversity by embracing it. As a direct result of this stance on diversity, and as a result of other contributing factors such as the Marxist ideology of the organisation, Eritrea now has a multilingual education policy that uses the countrys nine languages in schools. The application of language rights perspectives to the policy raises a number of questions (e.g. on policy implementation) that require further attention.