Foiling the anti-Mother Tongue bill

With the clear ineffectiveness of the Mother Tongue-based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE) versus the Bilingual Education Policy (BEP) as shown by the contrasting experiences of private schools and public schools (“Experience of private schools proves folly of DepEd’s Mother Tongue policy,” Letters, 11/5/21), House Bill No. 6405, which sought the abrogation of the policy, offered hope for our basic education to be able to bounce back.

Alas, Baguio City Rep. Marquez Go withdrew his bill during the technical working group meeting on March 19, 2021, due to strong clamor by the resource persons of the Department of Education (DepEd), National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA), the academe, and some NGOs to retain the policy. Go decided to instead work with these entities “in coming up with measures that will strengthen the MTB-MLE.”

Go heeded the wrong side. First, DepEd-Cordillera regional director Estela Cariño, the resource person with the most authority to speak about what’s happening on the ground, proposed that the Cordillera revert to Filipino and English as media of instruction from Kindergarten to Grade 3, except in areas where all the learners understand the community language, because the myriad languages in the region render the implementation of the policy extremely difficult. Second, this author’s paper proving the utter futility of the policy was met with dead silence. Third, most of the defenders did not know what they were talking about.

As the national MTB-MLE coordinator, Teaching and Learning Division chief Rosalina Villaneza should have taken the cudgels for the policy, but just like the rest, she ignored the serious allegations. Instead, she told this writer that it’s not fair to blame the MTB-MLE as it is only nine years old, while “the Bilingual Policy has been there for a century and yet we have not achieved our target.” When I replied that the MTB-MLE produced more nonreaders in nine years than all the other language policies did in 100 years, she merely asked that I give the program a chance.

In an email days later, NCCA commissioner Vicente Handa asserted that after children have mastered the mother tongue, they will learn English quicker, but since they are only introduced formally to English in Grade 4, their competence in the language cannot be compared with that of pre-MTB-MLE pupils since the latter started learning the language in Kindergarten. He said that to compare the effectivity of MTB-MLE English instruction with that of previous language policies, one must do the testing in Grade 12. He is unaware of the claim of the Lubuagan Experiment, one of the studies underpinning the MTB-MLE, that the teaching method makes learners superior in English right from Grade 1.

Prof. Marie Grace Reoperez of the University of the Philippines-Diliman College of Education barked up the wrong tree when she blamed the BEP for the very poor reading literacy of high school students. Apparently, she does not know that the BEP assigned the reading competency to Grade 1, but the DepEd stopped implementing the timetable in 2001 when it replaced the traditional “No Read, No Move” Policy with the “no nonreader by Grade 4” target and, ultimately, allowed illiterates to be promoted to any grade.

The claim of the Linguistic Society of the Philippines that the approval of the bill will “make us lose our momentum in our pursuit for (sic) quality education” was baseless and ridiculous. On the contrary, the MTB-MLE is one of the deadweights making any pursuit of quality education impossible.

Dr. Jennie Jocson of the Philippine Normal University said that proper teacher training will solve the MTB-MLE’s implementation problems. Cecilia Suarez of the Ateneo de Manila University also expressed the belief that with improved implementation, the MTB-MLE will work effectively. I wrote both asking if their recommended solutions could make MTB-MLE students be at par with their pre-MTB-MLE counterparts in English proficiency, considering the diminution of English in the MTB-MLE curriculum. Both did not reply.

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Estanislao C. Albano Jr. is a resident of Tabuk City, Kalinga, and a journalist by profession and passion.