Bill ending mother-tongue instruction OKd

THE Senate approved on July 23 a measure that seeks to discontinue the use of mother tongue as a medium of instruction in Kindergarten to Grade 3.

Senate Bill (SB) 2457 provides the optional implementation of monolingual classes, reverting the medium of instruction to Filipino and English.

«This bill complements Edcom 2's initiatives to assess and evaluate the curriculum and instruction in basic education. We identified that a key challenge in implementing the Mother Tongue Based–Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE) lies in the centralized structure of education governance within the Department of Education (DepEd), which struggles to accommodate the linguistic diversity of the country,» Karol Mark Yee, executive director of the Second Congressional Commission on Education (Edcom 2), said.

The House of Representatives passed a counterpart measure — House Bill (HB) 6717 — in February last year.

The implementation of the MTB-MLE program began in 2012. Republic Act 10533 formalized the shift to mother tongue-based multilingual education, requiring children in Kindergarten and Grades 1 to 3 to be taught in their respective native tongue.

By theory, children in the initial years of schooling can comprehend the curriculum if they are taught in the language they already know and understand.

However, difficulties were observed in its implementation in the last decade, especially in linguistically diverse areas of the country.

Consultations conducted in different regions, however, revealed problems in bridging between Key Stage 1 (Kindergarten to Grade 2), where the mother tongue is the medium of instruction for math and science, and the abrupt switch to English as a medium of instruction used in Key Stage 2 (Grade 4 to Grade 5).

Teachers also take extra time explaining the same lesson twice in two languages, which could have been spent on other lessons for the day.

Another significant issue observed in the implementation of the MTB-MLE was the scarcity of materials and textbooks in the mother tongue.

«More than a decade has passed since we implemented MTB-MLE, but a vast majority of our schools are not prepared to roll it out because of issues such as inadequate