Senate Oks bill halting mother tongue education

MANILA, Philippines — The Senate on Tuesday approved on final reading a bill that would discontinue the use of the mother tongue in multilingual classes from Kindergarten to Grade 3.

Senate Bill 2457 seeks to discontinue the Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education in the K to 12 program because of challenges in implementing the MTB-MLE in a multilingual country like the Philippines, according to the Second Congressional Commission on Education (EDCOM 2).

“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 MTB-MLE lies in the centralized structure of education governance within the Department of Education, which struggles to accommodate the linguistic diversity of the country,” EDCOM 2 executive director Karl Mark Yee said yesterday.

The Senate passed its version of the bill that was earlier approved by the House of Representatives last year.

EDCOM 2 co-chairman Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian cited the abrupt shift from mother tongue education in Grade 3 to the English language as a medium of instruction starting Grade 4 as a key gap in the program.

There are also an estimated 245 languages from several ethnolinguistic groups in the country, but MTB-MLE only covers the 19 major languages, Gatchalian added.

Schools suffer from the lack of language materials in the mother tongue for it to be an effective medium of instruction, the senator also noted.

Under the bill, the medium of instruction will revert to Filipino and English while regional languages may be used as “auxiliary” forms of instruction.