In today’s Southeast Asia, the Philippines is the only country with a national policy that institutionalizes and legitimizes “Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education” (MTB-MLE) in mainstream formal education. Order No. 74 of the Department of Education (DepEd) formalized MTB-MLE in 2009. More recently, President Benigno Aquino III signed the legally binding “Enhanced Basic Education Act of 2013,” which expanded the coverage of MTB-MLE in the K-12 Education. The law mandates the use of the mother tongue (MT) as the major medium of instruction (MOI) in kindergarten and the first three years of elementary school, among other things. From the fourth to the sixth grade, English and Filipino will be introduced through a transition program until these two languages can be utilized as primary MOI in secondary school.
It has not been easy to establish mother tongues as instructional languages. It followed the country’s continuous domination of bilingual education, which has been the norm since the early 1970s, when a political agreement was achieved to employ both English and Tagalog-based Filipino as the two medium of instructions in schools. In the teaching of mathematics and science, English was to be the MOI, and in the teaching of all other topics in the curriculum, English was to be the national language.
The MTB-MLE program of the Department of Education strives to make children multilingual and multiliterate, allowing them to speak and write in their mother tongue, the national language, and English. Multilingual people have numerous advantages. They have more communication alternatives, more cultural resources, and are generally more tolerant and adaptable. Multilingual people have a variety of cognitive benefits, including improved memory, language learning skills, and multitasking ability. Writing skills in one’s mother tongue are substantially correlated with writing skills in second languages, according to study, implying that a firm foundation in one’s mother tongue increases the possibility for literacy growth in other languages. School systems that do not integrate local languages, on the other hand, degrade multilingualism and multiliteracy (and the benefits that come with it) by pressuring students and parents to use the prevailing language.
These challenging times have made it clear how important it is to teach and learn in one’s native tongue. A child’s right to use his or her own language is guaranteed by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. As a result, the mother tongue policy has resulted in the creation of thousands of learning materials such as stories, poetry, songs, primers, and even textbooks in local languages that did not exist previously. Teachers, local writers, and publishers have put a lot of time and effort into creating these multilingual materials, which bring local knowledge, tradition, and history to life for the next generation.
All of us have to always remember the taste of our mother-tongue.
By: Lhannie L. Ubungen|Master Teacher I| Regional Science High School|Olongapo City
