Approaching language-in-education from top-to-bottom

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MANILA — Issues surrounding language-in-education is not only faced in the college level, but more so in the lower levels. And the worst part is problems are already piling up with teachers barely getting by.

This was the result of the study done on “Understanding Best Practices in Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE)” in the Philippines.

The problems that were unearthed from the study are anticipated given that they are indeed the problems that halt the progress of education reform in the Philippines. One of which is that the many stakeholders see that the mother tongue no longer has value if used outside specific domains. As a result, English becomes more superior and highly regarded by the community. MTB-MLE is ignored despite the latter’s aim of providing a good head start in promoting thinking skills among elementary students.

Other problems on MTB-MLE include lack of resources in terms of physical, human, intellectual, and even financial.

For instance, there are no teaching materials in MTB-MLE.

Moreover, there are also words that do not have direct translation.

Taking all these things into consideration, MTB-MLE may be solved in two ways – in two directions similar to cooking “bibingka” or rice cake.

First is the “apoy sa ilalim” solution. This aims to solidify teacher development efforts including the development of “lesson study” groups in the school. The group will be made up of five to six teachers who can work together to deal with one lesson at a time. This solution is meant to prepare good teaching materials that the teachers may use as reference in educating their students.

Second will be the “apoy sa ibabaw” solution. This intends to solve problems on language-in-education that eventually will lead to best practices. For example, why is the quality of teaching materials not at par with the original L1 as mandated by the MTB-MLE policies?

All these things boil down to the true enemy of MTB-MLE which is the monolingual mind-set. Once the said mind-set exists, efforts at improving the quality of education will all prove futile.