THE DEPARTMENT of Education called on the Senate to support its move to change the medium of instruction in schools to English and Filipino instead of the mother tongue.

DepEd Undersecretary Epimaco Densing III said the shift is one of the amendments in the K to 12 system that should be considered.

“The focus of DepEd for the next six years is to improve the quality of our students, improve their learning capabilities, improve our placing in the evaluation and assessment, improve the quality and standard of our teaching personnel and adapting advanced technologies,” Densing said.

“The mother tongue become the exception to the rule because we all know that there are certain areas in the country especially in the far-flung rural areas that many of the communities including their children are not introduced to English and Filipino, thereby, using mother tongue as their initial language,” he explained.

Senator Pia Cayetano supported the proposal, saying that teachers find it hard to teach Math and Science using mother tongue.

However, Cayetano said instead of treating mother tongue language as exception to the rule, it is more applicable if it will be used as supplementary medium of instruction.

However, Senate Committee on Basic Education chairman Sherwin Gatchalian urged the DepEd to conduct research and studies to support its argument.

“In theory the mother tounge promotes confidence, it’s a language that the student can easily understand and absorb but in practice it is also quite complicated especially in some areas,” Gatchalian said.