THE Senate has approved on third and final reading a bill seeking to discontinue the use of “Mother Tongue” or regional dialects in kindergartens to Grade 3 Senators Sherwin Gatchalian and Ramon Revilla Jr. introduced Senate Bill No. 2457 or “Discontinuing the Use of the Mother Tongue” as the medium of Instruction.
The measure proposes the return of the medium of instructions to Filipino and English languages as mandated by the Constitution, with regional languages or local dialects being used only as an auxiliary or supplementary media of instruction.
According to Gatchalian who sponsored the SB 2457, “Mother tongue as the medium of instruction is not a one-size-fits-all solution for every classroom.”
He noted that it was effective only in monolingual environments where learners are uniformly native speakers of the same mother tongue.
He said key experiments cited by the Department of Education (DepEd) as bases for implementing the mother tongue education proved that the policy is only effective in school settings where everybody is using the same language, especially in rural areas.
Gatchalian cited two studies conducted in homogeneous schools which showed that the group of learners exposed to the mother tongue instruction performed significantly better in Math and Reading as compared to the learners who were not.
However, the senator said there was no evidence showing that the mother tongue education works well in multilingual classes where learners speak different languages.
Under the bill, the principles and framework of the Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE) as embodied under Sec. 5 (f) of Republic Act No. 10533 may be applied in monolingual classes provided that the mother tongue to be used as a medium of instruction shall comply with the following requirements: 1) an official orthography is developed and published by the Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino (KWF). Orthography refers to the art of writing words with the proper letters, according to accepted usage and correct spelling; 2) an officially documented vocabulary published by the KWF such as glossary, dictionary, encyclopedia or thesaurus; 3) literature on languages and culture, such as big books, small books, picture stories, or wordless picture books; grammar book and availability of teachers in the school who speak and are trained to teach in the mother tongue.
DepEd, in consultation with the KWF, shall be tasked to develop a language mapping policy within one year once the bill is enacted into law. DepEd shall also implement a language mapping framework to properly identify and classify learners based on their mother tongue in order to systematically determine the existence of monolingual classes each school year.
Three years after the effectivity of the law, the education department shall review the optional implementation of the MTB-MLE program in monolingual classes, including learner assessment, teacher recruitment and matching, development of learning resources published in the mother tongue, capacity-building efforts for teachers and funding requirements for the program.
The DepEd will report the outcome of the review and its corresponding recommendations to the President, the Senate of the Philippines, and the House of Representatives not later than June 30 following the year of review.
“The review shall further include recommendations on whether to continue or discontinue the optional use of the mother tongue as a medium of instruction in monolingual classes based on the review conducted by the DepEd,” the bill stated.
Editor’s Note: This is an updated article. Originally posted with the headline Senate passes new bill that makes ‘mother tongue’ instruction optional in schools
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