Literacy in the Making of Multilingual Education: Sociolinguistic Ethnographic Perspectives

Yonas Mesfun Asfaha

Literacy is deeply rooted in the social and cultural practices of communities and manifestations of this are particularly vivid in multilingual contexts where unequal power relations between language groups reveal themselves in unequal access to literacy resources. Inequalities are reinforced in the daily cycles of life in classrooms and in the ways in which texts are mediated by teachers in bilingual interactions with learners. This study is situated in multilingual Eritrea, where nine languages and three scripts are used in primary education and where the teaching of initial literacy and classroom talk about texts has been shaped by specific historical, social and ideological processes. My research traces the historical development of multilingual education in this context and describes the contemporary social uses of written language and provides an account of language and literacy attitudes. It investigates the ways in which different language and literacy ideologies are articulated in classroom discourse and the ways in which these ideologies are bound up with the construction of cultural difference. Drawing on different strands of research in sociolinguistics, the study also answers recent calls for a narrowing of the gap between classroom-based research on literacy and studies of literacy in a wider social context.

About Yonas Mesfun Asfaha

Yonas Mesfun Asfaha graduated in 1998 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with an MA in Mass Communication after completing his undergraduate studies in English at the University of Asmara, Eritrea. Upon his return from Chapel Hill, he was hired as a lecturer at the newly established Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Asmara. After six years of teaching he started working on a Ph.D. research on comparative study of literacy acquisition and use across different languages and scripts based at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. He completed his Ph.D. studies in mid-2009 and graduated in November 2009. In 2008 he was awarded the International Reading Association’s 2008 Elva Knight Research Grant for a project on early literacy acquisition that focused on syllable-based instruction of alphabetic orthographies. He is currently serving as Assistant Professor at the Department of Eritrean Languages and Literature, College of Arts and Social Sciences, Eritrea.