Addressing illiteracy

Academics, bureaucrats, and policy-makers have joined in a grand, Greek chorus bewailing the country’s reading poverty problem. But this rare consensus, compelled by the embarrassment of a last place finish in the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) reading test, conceals disagreement on an issue so divisive it is rarely even raised. Children must acquire the rudiments of reading by Grade 3; but in which language?

The studious avoidance of this prejudicial question is puzzling. Choice of language cannot be irrelevant, when Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE), adopted after decades of debate and pilot-testing, remains the national policy. MTB-MLE mandates the use of the children’s mother tongue as medium of instruction (MOI) up to Grade 3, with Filipino and English taught as subjects, and permits a gradual transition up to Grade 6 to English and Filipino as MOI.

Foreign friends, incredulous that the Philippines ranked last in reading, assume that the PISA test was in English. Those who have spent time in the Philippines as graduate students, management executives, or diplomats remember English as dominant in the cinemas, broadcast media, and passably used among front-line staff in government agencies, commercial shops, and restaurants. They are correct.

Most countries administer the PISA tests in their national languages. Filipino children take the PISA test in English. Few have questioned the Department of Education (DepEd) PISA implementation. Many decision-makers and parents prefer that the children learn English, the global language for business, international relations, and overseas employment. Thus, Filipino children must struggle with a test formulated in a foreign language that less than 10 percent of families, even in the National Capital Region, use at home.

The rock bottom finish in the PISA reading test was shocking, even to Filipinos. But we know that the cultural environment foreigners remember from the ’60s to the ’80s that supporting the use of English no longer prevails. Even at higher levels of management in public and private sectors, conventional English is no longer the preferred medium of communication. Listen to congressional hearings.

Illiteracy among students beyond the stage they are expected capable of reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic loads them with a heavy burden.

Without progressive mastery of the three “Rs,” success in learning other subjects and critical thinking skills becomes unlikely. Reading is basic; children fail arithmetic when they cannot understand the written description of the problem. Dr. Karol Mark Yee, executive director of Second Congressional Commission on Education, recently urged DepEd to organize their classes to improve education in literacy by grouping children according to their reading capacity. Yee’s suggestion supports MTB-MLE’s goal and logic. But its implementation requires DepEd’s willingness: first, to test the actual learning conditions at school level and, second, to permit diversity in classroom instruction based on the test results, rather than imposing a one-size-fits-all approach. MTB-MLE also needed these two accommodations from DepEd to ensure that the children in the earliest grades received instruction in the language that most of them understood—the basic condition for enabling them to learn. In the typical, top-down mode of governance, however, DepEd Central Office made the decision on the MOI adopted in its classrooms based on the traditional ethno-linguistic classification of the provinces. This approach resulted in a high number of indigenous languages mandated as MOI among cultural minorities, compounding DepEd’s materials development and training needs. It also resulted in the inaccurate mapping of actual children’s mother tongue languages in regions of intensive, internal migration.

After 50 years of population movements and Filipinization campaigns, mandating from Manila what language schools must use as MOI may be efficient, but not necessarily effective. DepEd implemented MTB-MLE apparently without tests to identify which language the children in the classrooms knew best.

The classroom reorganization proposed by Yee thus requires the prior determination of which language would most effectively function as MOI for the greater number of children. But this is an easier task than testing for reading competency. A picture-vocabulary-test, which a few schools are now piloting, can be developed and used for this purpose.

It would not be surprising if such tests actually show that, across the nation, Filipino would now be the most effective MOI for more children in more schools—greatly lightening DepEd’s tasks.

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Edilberto C. de Jesus is professor emeritus at the Asian Institute of Management.

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