This Feb. 21 the world celebrates International Mother Language Day. The proclamation for its annual celebration was made by UNESCO in 1999 to encourage peoples worldwide to maintain their knowledge and use of the mother language as well as to learn other languages. Twenty-eight countries, including the Philippines, supported the UNESCO declaration.
In Bangladesh, Feb. 21 is known as Language Martyrs Day, to honor the students and intellectuals who died in 1952 when Bangladesh (then known as East Pakistan) resisted the imposition of Urdu as the sole national language. Protests demanding that Bangla be included as one of the state’s languages erupted countrywide. The state’s security forces responded by banning demonstrations. On Feb. 21, 1952, police opened fire at a peaceful rally in Dhaka, killing several students. The language movement resulted in the recognition of Bangla as an official language in 1956 and culminated in the 1971 war of liberation which led to Bangladesh independence from Pakistan.
In the Philippines, the first real celebration of International Mother Language Day was held in February 2008 at a language forum at the University of the Philippines’ College of Education. At that forum, I called upon Congress to abandon moves to install English as the sole medium of instruction in Philippine schools. I batted for the use of the mother tongue in the elementary grades in order to develop the child’s cognitive skills and to provide a solid foundation towards learning in Filipino and English in the higher grades. Rep. Magtanggol Gunigundo responded to this call by proposing House Bill 3719 also known as the Multilingual Education and Literacy Bill. It is the only language-in-education bill so far which is backed up by international and local research and experience and not by intuition and personal anecdotes.
The issue of language in education in the Philippines is a learning issue and a very urgent one. Filipino children are not learning because they cannot understand what the teacher is saying. The language in school is not their language.
Based on the Functional Literacy, Education and Mass Media Survey (FLEMMS) of 2003, out of 57.59 million Filipinos, aged 10-64, there were:
• 5.24 million who could not read and write
• 7.83 million who could not read, write and compute
• 18.37 million who could not read, write, compute and comprehend.
The functional illiteracy rate among the poor is even more alarming. Almost one out of two poor people (46 percent) cannot understand what they are reading, according to 2003 FLEMMS figures.
Inability to read and understand largely explains poor performance, low retention, and low learning outcomes in high school. For instance, from 2004-2006, the overall performance of fourth year high school students remained stagnant at around 45 percent, with marginal gains in Science and Mathematics and a drop of two percentage points for English.
Yet many people still insist that English should become the medium of instruction. They recount the good old days when their American mentors or products of the American system taught them the three Rs. The fact is the education system under the American regime favored the elite. Those who managed to complete the education cycle were mostly children from well-to-do families, or with truly gifted minds. According to Dr. Manuel Carreon, citing figures at the end of the 1930s, around 27.42 percent or about one-fourth of the children in the primary schools reached Grade 5; 72.58 percent or nearly three-fourths of the primary school children could attend only one or two, or three or, at most, four grades.
If we consider the money wasted on dropouts, repeaters and failures, studies show that second language-based education systems are more costly than mother tongue (language)-based (MLE) systems. A Guatemalan study showed that it is more expensive to produce a grade level passer (in Grades 1-6) in a Spanish medium school ($6,013) than in a Mayan school ($4,496). In Mali, a World Bank study found that French-only programs cost about 8 percent less than mother tongue schooling, but cost 27 percent more because of the difference in dropout and repetition rates.
Producing instructional materials in many languages can be expensive if produced in full color, glossy pages. The successful MLE experiences in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Kenya, Ethiopia, Cameroon and the Philippines prove that teacher-made cardboard covered books, with simple black-and-white drawings, are acceptable and just as effective in early primary education. In Papua New Guinea, the national government moved the materials development process to the communities themselves. This way, the communities themselves produced instructional materials in half of their 800 local languages.
Back here, the University of the Philippines’ College of Education, the Summer Institute of Linguistics, the Department of Education and education stakeholders are working together to help enable teachers and communities to produce their own materials in their own languages.
Dr. Ricardo Ma. Nolasco is an associate professor of the Department of Linguistics, University of the Philippines, Diliman; a board member of the Linguistic Society of the Philippines; and the adviser for multilingual education initiatives of the Foundation for Worldwide People Power.
