Incorporating Traditional Practices into Modern Schooling

Contributing Author: Yonas Asfaha.

The focus here is a local literacy practice in Saho, a language spoken by the predominantly Muslim Saho ethnic group in southern Eritrea. In the syllabic alphabetic instruction in Saho, which uses the Latin alphabet, the teaching of consonants is embedded in the teaching of consonant-vowel combinations (e.g., da instead of d). Except for the vowel sounds which are taught first, the teaching of consonants is done at the level of letter-syllable correspondences and never at the letter-sound level. This practice originates partly in the traditional Arabic teaching in religious schools, where children recite the Arabic letters alif, ba, ta, etc. The Saho curriculum has adopted this syllabic teaching from the start of education in Saho in the 1980s. In a comparative study of reading in Saho and other languages, Asfaha et al. (2009) have found out that this syllabic teaching produced better reading and spelling results for Saho grade 1 children when compared with children learning another alphabetic language, Kunama, where the emphasis was on teaching the sounds of the letters (not consonant-vowel combinations) and teaching high and rising tone diacritics and long and short vowel markers in the orthography (e.g., Selláasĭ sésa kitákkó, ‘buy a goat tomorrow’; Selláasĭ séésa kitákkó, ‘buy clothes tomorrow’) (Asfaha et al., 2014). The differences in reading and spelling results between the two languages became insignificant by grade 4.

Although Saho is not a tonal language, long vowels and consonant geminations are similarly noted as in Kunama. In many other respects the two languages are similar. Both orthographies are consistent in their representation of sounds or syllables. The two languages have simple syllabic structures. Typical Saho words contain V, CV, VC, and CVC syllables (e.g., alsa ‘moon’, faras ‘horse’) and does not allow consonant clusters. Kunama has an even simpler CV open syllable structure, especially with nouns (e.g., loanwords like kubbayat, ‘cup’ from Tigre, another Eritrean language, add a vowel at the end, kubbayata, to become a Kunama noun). Both languages have rich morphology. The difference, as noted earlier, mainly is in the teaching of beginning literacy in schools. For example, while consonants are explicitly taught in Kunama, in Saho literacy instruction, syllable-end single consonants (e.g., the consonant in the second syllable of faras) are not explicitly taught, i.e., students are expected to work them out on their own.

The findings suggested that the easier to access language units, i.e., syllables, behind the teaching of Saho alphabetic reading was responsible for the faster development of early reading in Saho when compared to another, phoneme-based teaching of alphabetic Kunama. This advantage became less important as children’s skills developed in later grades.

We have argued that the decision by Saho educators to incorporate cultural literacy practices in literacy instruction has created positive results for early level Saho children (Asfaha et al., 2014). In its attempt to infuse local practices in a language written in Latin script, a script usually associated with colonial history in Africa but chosen from among others in the region for its ‘neutrality’, and instructional materials and processes associated with modern schooling, the Saho curriculum in Eritrea can be taken as an example of an educational program that has shown visible attempts to show cultural or contextual sensitivity in delivering education to corners of the country that have not seen a school until recently. This sensitivity, to some extent, has helped them produce curriculum responsive to the learner’s needs, at least in the early years of Saho children’s education.


References

Asfaha, Y. M., Kurvers, J., & Kroon, S. (2009). Grain size in script and teaching: A comparative study on literacy acquisition in Ge’ez and Latin. Applied Psycholinguistics, 30(4), 709-724.

Asfaha, Y.M., Kroon, S., & Kurvers, J. (2014). Building early reading on syllables and cultural literacy practices. In K. Juffermans, Y.M. Asfaha, & A.K. Abdelhay (eds.), African Literacies: Ideologies, Texts, Education. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.