Press Release - PRIB: Schools may discontinue use of mother tongue from kindergarten to Grade 3 soon

The Senate approved on third and final reading Tuesday, July 23, 2024, a bill seeking to discontinue the mandatory use of the mother tongue as a medium of instruction from kindergarten to Grade 3.

Senate Bill No. 2457, also known as Discontinuing the Use of the Mother Tongue as the Medium of Instruction, was introduced by Senators Win Gatchalian and Ramon Bong Revilla Jr.

The bill seeks to revert the medium of instruction to Filipino and English pursuant to the 1987 Constitution. Regional languages shall only serve as an auxiliary or supplementary media of instruction.

"Mother tongue as the medium of instruction is not a one-size-fits-all solution for every classroom. It is effective only in monolingual environments where learners are uniformly native speakers of the same mother tongue," Gatchalian, who sponsored the bill, said.

He said key experiments cited by the Department of Education as bases for implementing the mother tongue education proved that the policy is only effective in school settings when 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 is no evidence 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,