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Following the alleged strong public pressure, in 2005 the education bureau of Amhara regional state of Ethiopia issued a new form of bilingual education system which is different from the Amharic only medium that was in use for the previous years at upper primary schools of the region. The policy stipulates a differential use of Amharic and English for teaching different subjects.The change introduces a kind of bilingual education known as Bilingual education in Majority Languages, which allows the use of two languages in education. This study compared the performances against the views of teachers, students, parents and education bureau officials towards this new system of bilingual education which has partially empowered English over Amharic by using both qualitative and quantitative data. It was found that, apart from education bureau officials, almost all participants would prefer English medium for all subjects across the curriculum though their performances suggested the other way round. The study also indicated possible ways of implementing bilingual education in the region which can be extended to other regions.

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Mulugeta Tarekegn Tsegaye: BA, Foreign Languages & Literature, Addis Ababa University (2003); MA, Linguistics, Addis Ababa University (2008), MSc., European Masters in Clinical Linguistics jointly at the Universities of Groningen, Joensuu, and Potsdam (2010) and a lecturer of Linguistics at Addis Ababa University (2010 to date).

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