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By Prof. Fred S. Cabuang
Sooner than later, our advocacy to save
Philippine regional and indigenous languages will be realized,
hopefully this year as the world celebrates Unesco’s
“International Year of Languages.”
On May 19, Sen. Mar Roxas filed Senate Bill
2294, the “Omnibus Education Reform Act of 2008,” which mandates
the use of the mother tongue as the mode of instruction from Grades
1 to 3 and investing intensively on teaching methods using the local
language for Grades 1 to 3 teachers, expands basic education to 12
years and makes pre-school mandatory.
The bill seeks to reform the education system by
requiring the use of regional and indigenous languages, which “has
been proven to be the best medium of learning all over the world,
based on Unesco findings for the last two decades.”
Senator Roxas reports that for every 100
children who enrolled in Grade 1, 65 finish Grade 6 and only 43
students finish high school. The biggest dropouts occur during the
first three years of elementary education.
Presently, more than 75 percent of Grade 6
students have not achieved reading comprehension while only 2
percent, 7 percent and 16 percent of Fourth Year high-school
students have achieved the required mastery in Science, English and
Math, respectively.
The Lubuagan test
How important is the use of local language or
“mother tongue” in the education of our children? Just recently,
Unesco featured a phenomenal achievement in Philippine educational
system called “The Lubuagan Kalinga First Language Component [FLC]”
multilingual education program in the province of Kalinga, northern
Philippines.
This study highlights the Multi-Lingual
Education (MLE) programs that prepare students from minority
language communities to successfully retain their home language and
culture, while achieving well in national education programs. This
is accomplished by teaching core skills first using the mother
tongue, like Lubuagan language, then transitioning into languages of
education.
The municipality of Lubuagan in the heart of
Kalinga province is a fourth-class \o “Philippine municipality”
municipality with a population of about 10,000 people in 1,800
households (Census, 2000). Kalinga province is surrounded by the
provinces of Abra, Apayao, Cagayan, Isabela and Mountain Province in
the northern part of the Philippines. The climate is cool throughout
the year. Land area is around 33,000 hectares of sloping and rugged
terrain.
Since 1998, following the national curriculum
set by the DepEd, the Lubuagan Kalinga First Language Education
project has been implemented. According to the initial study in 2003
by the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) experts Rose Dumatog
and Diane Dekker, “Lubuagan is a monolingual municipality with few
outsiders. Children in Lubuagan begin school speaking Lubuagan but
no other language. The languages of the classroom are Filipino and
English, both new languages to the students. The students are
expected to learn to read, write and master curriculum content in
Filipino and English while at the same time acquiring these
languages.”
In spite of numerous constraints, including the
use of three languages (the mother tongue and two national
languages, the media of instruction, English and Filipino) in the
school setting, student test scores indicate greater gains when the
mother tongue (Lubuagan) is used as medium of instruction for
teaching content and for teaching the two national languages.
Mother tongue best
The Lubuagan Kalinga case study shows a
successful MLE program in the Philippine context. Among the 10
districts in Kalinga, Lubuagan is the only district that uses the
MLE program. In other words, the first language in school that is
used by teachers and students in all subjects including Math and
Science, is the Lubuagan language and not Filipino or English. The
other nine districts in Kalinga use the regular educational
bilingual system using only Filipino and English in the classrooms.
In early 2007, Lubuagan District Grade 3 students ranked No. 1 in
the Kalinga division on the 2006 NAT Grade 3 Reading Test, scoring
15 percent to 25 percent higher than all other districts in Kalinga
division in the English and Filipino reading tests.
Kalinga district received test results in
English (76.5 percent) and Filipino (76.44 percent), followed by
Tinglayan with English (64.5 percent) and Filipino (61.4 percent),
and the third is Pasil with English (51.9 percent) and Filipino
(47.7 percent).
Pass the Roxas bill
Diane Dekker, SIL consultant to the Lubuagan FLC
program, points out that “the mandated languages of instruction
and literacy in the Philippines are foreign to the ethno linguistic
minority student; this predetermines a lack of understanding of the
content of the lesson. Using the language the child understands not
only affirms the value of the child and his cultural and language
heritage, but also enables the child to immediately master the
curriculum content while at the same time facilitating the
acquisition of Filipino and English.”
If it takes a legislative measure, such as
Senator Roxas’ SBN 2294, to save our dying and endangered
languages, the Defenders of Indigenous Languages of the Archipelago
(DILA) will do its best to see this bill become a law!
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Prof. Fred S. Cabuang is the founder and
chairman emeritus of the Institute for Linguistic Minority, an NGO
engaged in saving all languages in the Philippines and the PRO-board
member of Defenders of Indigenous Languages of the Archipelago. For
comments, e-mail linguisticminority @gmail.com.
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