BAGUIO City Rep. Mark Go has filed a bill seeking to suspend the implementation of the Mother Tongue-Based-Multilingual Education Policy.

In filing House Bill 3925, Go urged the Second Congressional Commission on Education of EdCom II to conduct a comprehensive evaluation and assessment of the policy.

Regional and native languages are used as the medium of instruction for students in Kindergarten until Grade 3.

However, based on the recent study of the University of the Philippines-Baguio, Go said teachers are confronted with three possible scenarios in the use of the mother tongue.

These are when majority of the students communicate in the regional mother tongue, which is more common in rural areas; when the teacher uses the regional lingua franca but the students use different mother tongue and when the students’ linguistic profiles show that they are more competent with Filipino or English instead of the regional lingua franca.

“The formative years of the students from kindergarten to Grade 3 are crucial in preparing them for personal and academic development. Ultimately, it is the development of the learners that would suffer when we impose the mandatory use of mother tongue when the teachers themselve are not equipped to teach using the standard mother tongue,” Go said in his explanatory note.