Preparing Student Teachers to Teach Reading in Mother Tongue:

• In Event: The Role of Pre-Service Education in Producing and Perpetuating (In)Equalities:The Case of Early Grade Reading (Part ONE)

Proposal

In Ethiopia, USAID supports the “Reading for Ethiopia Achievement Developed Technical Assistance” (READ TA) project. The program is designed to ensure that sufficient materials and teacher training exist in the 7 most widely-spoken languages in the country so that children who speak those languages can read and write well in them before the end of the second grade.

This presentation focuses on the efforts of a team of educators from the Florida State University and their Ethiopian counterparts to work with the Ministry of Education, Regional State and Education Bureaus, and Colleges of Teacher Education (CTEs) to reform the current mother tongue language program for pre-service teachers so that it will incorporate a focus on teaching reading. These efforts have been unique in that they have been an integral part of the work of the program from the beginning, and have focused on creating a strong, evidence-based foundation for the teaching of reading pedagogies within the mother tongue languages syllabi used in the CTEs. This presentation addresses the methodical process used to accomplish this reform. Results of the baseline assessment of the state of preparation to teach reading in each of the seven languages are shared, the particular models of reading instruction that are promoted are addressed, the process of infusing information about reading pedagogy into the language curricula is described, and the challenges of producing instructional modules that pre-service faculty could use to implement the update curricula in their teaching are detailed. From these descriptions, participants have an opportunity to learn about the particular complexities of working to revise multiple language curricula to include information about reading instruction, (rather than developing separate modules focused exclusively on reading).

The presenters then present the results from their training of over 200 teacher educators on the results of each of the modules, as well as the data from the monitoring and evaluation of the program implementation conducted in 36 CTEs. In this portion of the presentation, the challenges of building the capacity of teacher educators to address reading instruction in mother tongue languages are highlighted. The presentation concludes with reflections on the lessons learned from this nationwide effort and with recommendations for best practices in the development of multi-lingual, reading-focused pre-service curricula such as those created for Ethiopia’s Preservice Mother Tongue Language Programs.

Author

• Flavia S Ramos-Mattoussi, Florida State University