THE Senate approved on third and final reading a bill seeking to discontinue the mandatory use of the mother tongue as a medium of instruction from Kindergarten to Grade 3.

Voting 22-0, the senators approved Senate Bill No. 2457, also known as Discontinuing the Use of the Mother Tongue as the Medium of Instruction which was introduced by Senators Sherwin Gatchalian and Ramon Bong Revilla Jr.

The bill seeks to revert the medium of instruction to Filipino and English under the 1987 Constitution while Regional languages shall only serve as an auxiliary or supplementary media of instruction.

“Mother tongue as the medium of instruction is not a one-size-fits-all solution for every classroom. It is effective only in monolingual environments where learners are uniformly native speakers of the same mother tongue,” Gatchalian, who sponsored the bill, said.

He said key experiments cited by the Department of Education as bases for implementing mother tongue education proved that the policy is only effective in school settings when everybody is using the same language, especially in rural areas.

Gatchalian cited two studies conducted in homogeneous schools which showed that the group of learners exposed to the mother tongue instruction performed significantly better in Math and Reading as compared to the learners who were not.

However, the senator said there is no evidence that mother tongue education works well in multilingual classes where learners speak different languages.

Under the bill, the principles and framework of the Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education as embodied under Sec. 5 (f) of Republic Act No. 10533 may be applied in monolingual classes provided that the mother tongue to be used as a medium of instruction shall comply with the following requirements: 1) an official orthography is developed and published by the Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino Orthography refers to the art of writing words with the proper letters, according to accepted usage and correct spelling; 2) an officially documented vocabulary published by the KWF such as glossary, dictionary, encyclopedia or thesaurus; 3) literature on languages and culture, such as big books, small books, picture stories, or wordless picture books; grammar book and availability of teachers in the school who speak and are trained to teach in the mother tongue.

The Department of Education, in consultation with the KWF, shall be tasked to develop a language mapping policy within one year once the bill is enacted into law.

DepEd shall also implement a language mapping framework to properly identify and classify learners based on their mother tongue to systematically determine the existence of monolingual classes each school year.

The Deped, three years after the effectivity of the Act, shall review the optional implementation of the MTB-MLE program in monolingual classes, including learner assessment, teacher recruitment, and matching, development of learning resources published in the mother tongue, capacity-building efforts for teachers and funding requirements for the program.

The DepEd shall report the outcome of the review and its corresponding recommendations to the President, the Senate of the Philippines, and the House of Representatives not later than June 30 following the year of review.

“The review shall further include recommendations on whether to continue or discontinue the optional use of the mother tongue as a medium of instruction in monolingual classes based on the review conducted by the DepEd,” according to the bill.