Katha 2014: What MTB-MLE is and What it is Not

Minutes of the Workshop Transcribed. Speaker Dr. Ricardo Ma. Nolasco

KATHA 2014 Part 2: Day 6

What MTB-MLE and What it is Not

Dr. Ricardo Ma. Nolasco

Associate Professor

University of the Philippines Diliman

August 30, 2014

Minutes of the Workshop

1. Introduction. The speaker emphasized the help and continuous assistance of the Congressman for him to push through the MTB MLE program. He started with the short stories in big books translated in the mother tongues of the people there. He turned to some of the pages where the native language Miraya was written and asked some of the participants to interpret the story. He emphasized the importance of learning reading through short stories with the use of pictures in the books. He surfaced the problem of not using these native languages in school, instead stories are translated in English.

2. The Philippine Experience. He focused on the teaching of English which is a failure in the Philippine context of curriculum. The author said that the Filipinos must first be intellectualized before learning English.

3. 1987 Philippine Constitution. He discussed the Philippine constitution where the Filipino and English must be used as medium of instruction in school. But then it should be emphasized that it should be based on the constitutional law. However the constitution states English must be used as the MOI in Philippine schools.

3.1. ECCD Curriculum. Early Years Act 2013 states the use of the native language from 0 to 4 years old. It shall use the child’s mother tongue as the medium of instruction, however this is not followed in most daycare centers.

3.2. Enhanced Basic Education Act of 2013. This law states that the students should be taught in the native language not in the first three years of education but six years of education. Provisions were provided regarding the use of native language as MOI. These provisions involve that the language used should be the one understood by the students. It also includes assessment of the learners in the first three years of schooling of the students using the materials, exams and other means of evaluation which should be done in the mother tongue.

3.3. Transition Program. DepEd shall have a formulated and gradual transition program from Grade 4 to Grade 6 so that Filipino and English will be introduced as the medium of instruction for the students to realize that this should be the MOI in the higher years of education. Transition period starts when the student and his competence are ready to use English and Filipino as MOI. This is yet to be determined because our implementation is still until grade 3 only. Questions were raised on the students with different mother tongues which are blended in a linguistically heterogeneous classroom. The answer is that the teacher should know the native languages of the students and should practice the most appropriate language to be used in the classroom. Another question was raised on the global competitiveness of the student in English if the students should be first taught in the native language. The answer is the language of English is also improved when the students are already honed to their mother tongue. This is an immersion strategy for the students to learn their mother tongue before they are immersed in the English language.

4. Implementing the Rules and Regulations. The speaker clarified the transition of L1 to L2. This is to mean that the student should be honed both to L1 and L2 and not forget the L1 already. L1 should be used for life. MTB MLE is an additive education where L1 adds to the L2 of the students. There has been a study where students who learned in L1 and L2 have higher scores than those who only learned L2. This is due to the high drop out rates of the students because of socio-economic and linguistic factors.

5. Reading without Understanding. The issue of non-readers and students who cannot comprehend is a big problem in today’s Philippine education. FLEMMS (a type of international survey) concluded that literacy in the Philippines is only read, write and compute, but no comprehend. Level 3 includes understanding of the reading, however in the Philippines the students only reached a large percentage on level 2 only. Survey questions were raised by the speaker to test the participants their literacy. The survey concludes that 1 out of 5 are illiterate, which may be bad news but can be solved. Other international tests which includes TIMMS in 2003 states that the Philippines is in the bottom 3 of the most literate students in the world. The reason behind is the use of language for the students. Philippines is one of the countries who use a language which is not the mother tongue of the students, because there is the misconception that English learners are good students in the subjects.

6. Conditions under Aquino Administration. There are slight changes in the improvement of the literacy of the students, which ranges to 68%. Comprehension is 67%. How about in English? Their fluency is the same in the Filipino; that is, only 18% in reading comprehension. This is a question of how come the students who are taught in English first have low scores in English. NAT results show that achievement scores in grade 6 and high school is below 80%, while NCAE results compared to 2012 and 2013 show that the students’ GSA are only 37% from 45%, science and math the worst. These figures came from DepEd. There may indeed be a problem in the teaching of the subjects taught to the students, a problem that can definitely be solved. TEPT in 2012 results in grade 2 in the Philippines results show that structure and written expression are the lowest in scores in both the students and the teachers. Teachers’ Mean Performance shows that they also have low scores below 50% in English, Science and Math. Valenzuela Experiment 2010 shows that Tagalog questions are longer than in the English questions. The experiment, which was tested in English shows that high achievers got 1 out of 10 questions only, while those tested in Filipino got 4 out 10, which may be something related to language, especially in the comparison between high achievers and average students who answered the same questions. Other tests include the survey of what Filipinos read which are not textbooks—these include newspapers and comics, bibles cookbooks and history.

7. Conclusion. There is a need of change in the law—that is MTBMLE by letting the teachers finish the 5-day workshop in Valenzuela. 

Second Linguistics Research Colloquium

Waray. Ayta Mag-antsi. Masbatenyo. Ibanag. Tagalog. Filipino. 

In light of the Buwan ng Mga Wika this August, the Department of Linguistics UP Diliman conducted its Second Linguistics Research Colloquium yesterday, where three pairs of undergraduate students and two graduate students presented their papers on different topics in different languages.

The topics ranged from the use of the placeholder kuan in Waray, comparative analysis of adjectives in Ayta Mag-antsi and Masbatenyo to the imperatives in Ibanag.

The graduate student topics included the clausal structure in Tagalog and metalexicographic analysis of coordinating conjunctions in Filipino dictionaries.

The presenters for the undergraduate student papers included Grace Ann Dominguez and Abigail Palad, Violy Bolano and Lisette Manliclic, and Eunice Pama and Maira Matsushita, while in the graduate papers Mr. Venson Villareal and Mr. Ivan Bondoc.

The researches were very remarkable and may even be more interesting if the researchers continued their papers. The speakers were very engaging and were all witty in answering the questions that were raised.

Inquirer's SPECIAL REPORT: Language-in-education row: A ‘bibingka’ solution

Behold the theory of Bibingka, the last of the three-part series of the Special Report.

By Isabel Pefianco Martin, Resty M. Cena, Ricardo Ma. Nolasco

http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/630863/language-in-education-row-a-bibingka-solution

MANILA, Philippines–While the language-in-education controversy at the college level is at a cross-point, the lower levels are having troubles of their own.

At a curriculum forum held on July 31, results of a study on “Understanding Best Practices in Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education in (MTB-MLE) in the Philippines” have confirmed the fears of many: Problems are piling up, with teachers barely getting by.

Jointly undertaken by the University of the Philippines’ Assessment Curriculum Technology Research Center-College of Education (ACTRC) and the University of Melbourne, the study sought to identify the challenges stakeholders are facing in implementing MTB-MLE and the coping strategies they are adopting to overcome these challenges.

Participating in Phase 1 of the study were eight schools, five MTB-MLE coordinators, 32 mother tongue teachers, and 56 parents of pupils/learners taught in their first language (L1).

The problems revealed by the study are not totally unanticipated. These are the typical hurdles that education reform projects initially encounter while being carried out on a massive scale.

Such difficulties, however, will become serious and irreversible if appropriate coping strategies are not applied soon.

One problem is that stakeholders perceive limited use, as well as lower value of the mother tongue outside specific domains.

As expected, English remains more highly regarded and valued by the community. It is a perception that is borne by facts. Lost or ignored was the primary reason for MTB-MLE, which is to give students a head start in developing higher-order thinking skills, particularly in the elementary grades.

This problem may be a sign that MTB-MLE and the community are at cross-purposes. Advocacy efforts may have to be reinvigorated.

More problems

The rest of the concerns points to inadequacy of resources—physical, human, intellectual, as well as financial resources.

This is manifested in the following: the short supply of learning and teaching materials; the tendency to translate existing materials instead of creating new ones directly from the L1; the lack of academic science and math vocabularies in the L1; the teacher’s low proficiency in the spoken and academic L1; and specific to the Tagalog regions, the confusion caused by teaching the Mother Tongue subject (Tagalog), while also teaching the Filipino subject.

Although the ACTRC-University of Melbourne study did not touch on the teachers’ mastery of content, there was some discussion at the forum about teachers’ poor performance in the English, Science and Math tests given in 2012 and 2013.

Test results for the two years showed elementary teachers getting low mean percentage scores of 50.53 percent and 54 percent in the English test, and 46.7 percent and 49 percent in the process skills test for Science and Math.

Clearly, there are serious digressions from our language-in-education policy and formidable-looking obstacles to its implementation.

Bottom-up approach

We argue for solutions that take both the top-down and bottom-up approaches. In other words, we push for addressing the problems in two directions, similar to cooking “bibingka” (rice cake).

Following this bibingka approach, one “apoy sa ilalim” solution is to intensify teacher development efforts, specifically, in the formation of “lesson study” groups at the school level or in a group of schools.

In Japan, where this concept originated, lesson study is a process in which teachers jointly plan, observe, analyze, produce materials, test and refine classroom lessons. A lesson study group is made up of five to six teachers who collaborate with an expert in tackling one lesson at a time.

It is an approach that hits three birds with one stone because it targets the preparation of quality materials, the training of teachers, and the gradual development of the academic vocabulary and register. It is a homemade solution to seemingly insurmountable problems.

Widely credited for the steady improvement of math and science education in Japan, lesson study also applies to language, social studies and other subjects. It is now being popularized in the Philippines by the UP National Institute of Science and Mathematics Education and is being tried out on a division-wide basis in Valenzuela City by Willy Cabral, superintendent of the Department of Education.

Top-down approach

To strengthen our MTB-MLE, practice also requires “apoy sa ibabaw” solutions. After all, without fire from the top, the bibingka would be half-cooked.

The top-down approach may be useful in providing clear-cut answers to some language-in-education questions that remain unanswered. Such questions include the following:

– What exactly is the content of the Mother Tongue subject, especially in the Tagalog regions where teachers understandably find overlaps between this subject and the Filipino subject?

– What is the place of code-mixing and code-switching in our language-in-education policy, considering that these practices come naturally in a multilingual country where language contact is inevitable?

– Why are materials continually translated and not created originally from the L1 as is the ideal practice in MTB-MLE policies?

In the end, it is the monolingual mind-set that is the true enemy of MTB-MLE. While this mind-set exists, our efforts at educational reform will surely fail. And with this failure looms a dismal future for our children.

Editor’s Note: Dr. Isabel Pefianco Martin (mmartin@ateneo.edu), Dr. Resty M. Cena (restycena@gmail.com) and Dr. Ricardo Ma. Nolasco (rnolascoupdiliman@gmail.com) are practicing Filipino linguists and educators.

Read more: http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/630863/language-in-education-row-a-bibingka-solution#ixzz3AsZeBvw6 

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Inquirer SPECIAL REPORT A language war in the time of DAP

This a good read in the timely issues of DAP and MTB-MLE
by Dr. Ricardo Ma. Nolasco, Dr. Resty Cena and Dr. Isabel Martin

http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/630166/a-language-war-in-the-time-of-dap

(First of three parts)

MANILA, Philippines–Requiring Filipino as a subject and as a language of instruction in college will be good for Philippine education. For this to happen, the reasons given by the pro-Filipino side in this controversy will have to be robust and compelling.

Proponents for Filipino as a language of instruction anchor their stand on two arguments. The first is a familiar one: Filipino has been recognized under the 1987 Constitution as the national and official language for education and communication.

The second argument is that teaching Filipino and using it as a language of instruction, especially in higher education, will contribute to its intellectualization.

But here comes the rub. The constitutional provision on Filipino as medium of official communication and instruction is not without conditions. These conditions are contained in the following sections of the nation’s Charter:

(1) “Subject to provisions of law and as the Congress may deem appropriate, the government shall take steps to initiate and sustain the use of Filipino as a medium of official communication and as language of instruction in the educational system.”

(2) “For purposes of communication and instruction, the official languages of the Philippines are Filipino and, until otherwise provided by law, English.”

(3) “The regional languages are the auxiliary official languages in the regions and shall serve as auxiliary media of instruction therein.”

Clearly, Filipino is only one of the country’s official languages. At the grassroots, the local language joins Filipino and English as an official medium in governance and in education.

3 laws

In fact, Congress recently passed three laws that redivided the instructional space among the learner’s first language (L1), English and Filipino. Enacted in 2012 was the Kindergarten Education Act followed in 2013 by the Early Years Act and the Enhanced Basic Education Act.

Now enshrined in law is the country’s language-in-education policy:  L1-based multilingual education. Students at the elementary grades will be taught in their first language, but will take up Filipino and English as second language (L2) subjects.

The Department of Education will determine when the shift from L1 to L2 as primary and auxiliary language of instruction should be made, provided the shift is gradual and not abrupt.

To us, the key criterion is the student’s competence to receive academic instruction in their L2s alongside their L1.

The ability to transfer L1 concepts to the L2s and vice-versa ensures that the L2s add to the learner’s L1 competence and do not replace nor subtract it.

That said, a language policy for college education must adhere to the same principle of additive education. Instruction should be delivered in a language or languages understood by the learners.

Diversity

The pervasive socio-linguistic diversity throughout the country is another factor to consider in choosing the appropriate language of instruction.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with using L1 or Filipino for some subjects, English for others, and even mixed varieties for the remainder, provided real learning is taking place and the course objectives are being met.

But since there is no law or legislation on the language of instruction at the college level, it is best to leave this issue for individual institutions of higher learning to decide.

The intellectualization of the national language is a noble objective, but one that is clearly secondary to effective student learning.

Besides, the new language-in-education policy already provides us with enough space to develop this predominantly oral language into an academic producer and carrier of knowledge in the higher domains of learning.

Decongesting curriculum

The teaching of Filipino subjects in college is a different matter.  Before, there were nine units of Filipino that formed part of general education until technical experts banished them to Grades 11 and 12.

This runs counter to the very idea behind adding two years to basic education, namely “to decongest the curriculum.”

A study in 2011 compared the educational systems in Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei and the Philippines. Curricular time per subject was found to be longest in the country with the shortest cycle—the Philippines.

If our students were cramming in 10 years what students in other countries were learning in 12 years, why congest the program even more?

No guarantee

In the first place, expanding basic education by two years is no guarantee to quality instruction. A literacy survey in 2008, for instance, reported that one out of every five elementary graduates was functionally illiterate.

A second study in 2010 by Dr. Abraham Felipe and Dr. Carolina Porio concluded that our short education cycle could not be blamed for the low science and math scores of Filipino students.

Why? According to their research, there were countries with short cycles having high scores and countries with long cycles having low scores.

In sum, we are not persuaded by the rationale in removing the Filipino courses in college, and we join the call for its immediate reinstatement in the general curriculum.

In case these courses do not qualify under the new definition of general education, then the correct procedure is to revise the courses, and not to remove them.

Editor’s Note: Dr. Ricardo Ma. Nolasco (rnolascoupdiliman@gmail.com), Dr. Resty M. Cena (restycena@gmail.com) and Dr. Isabel Pefianco Martin (mmartin@ateneo.edu) are practicing Filipino linguists and educators.

Read more: http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/630166/a-language-war-in-the-time-of-dap#ixzz3APNfwEKH
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Nuffnang and Hapee Special Screening

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