[lg policy] Philippines: Local dialects key to global success

Tue Jun 22 14:12:42 UTC 2010

Local dialects key to global success: Why we’re left behind

By Philip Tubeza
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 03:57:00 06/22/2010

MANILA, Philippines—To be globally competitive, Filipinos must learn
first in their local dialect. City dwellers may cringe upon hearing
the accent of people from the provinces, but experts say that one of
the keys to a good education is teaching students early on in their
mother tongue, or dialect, instead of in English or in Filipino. Dina
S. Ocampo, an education professor at the University of the
Philippines, said that numerous international studies had shown that
using Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE)—or teaching
young students in their dialect—actually improved their ability to
learn English, Filipino, and other subjects later on. “They learn best
when the language used for learning is something they used. The
analogy here is like a pyramid. You need a strong foundation to learn
new things. It’s like you use your old strengths to learn subsequent
things,” Ocampo said in an interview.

“To be globally competitive, you must go local. They say that in
business. Why can’t we do it in learning? We must start from local.”

Fundamental policy

The Department of Education (DepEd) in July last year
“institutionalized” MTB-MLE as a “fundamental educational policy and
program … in the whole stretch of formal education, including
preschool and in the Alternative Learning System (for out-of-school
youth).”  At present, 104 schools are implementing MTB-MLE in the
country’s 16 regions, according to the DepEd. Eight major languages as
mother tongue are being used for instruction there: Tagalog, Ilokano,
Pangasinense, Kapampangan, Bikolano, Waray, Cebuano and Hiligaynon.
While the MTB-MLE effectively replaced the country’s 37-year-old
bilingual language policy, which recognized a student’s mother tongue
only as auxiliary language, more initiatives have still to be done,
including disabusing people of the popular belief that teaching young
students English will help them learn it better.

“That thinking that ‘If you start early, you’ll learn it better’ is
really wrong when it comes to language, particularly reading and
writing, because there are no foundational skills,” Ocampo said.

No foundation skills

“It’s not true that adults will not learn a new language as well as
children. There’s a lot of research that says that that is not true
because adults actually have this good language foundation,” she
added.

Ocampo also said that another strand of research “particular to
reading” showed that “if you want to teach a child reading in a second
language,” it is best to “use his literacy in his first language as
basis.”

She added that children also form well their thinking skills—like
critical thinking, drawing conclusions, making comparisons,
understanding cause and effect, and sequencing—“in the language that
they know.”

Learn first language well

“When we were talking to parents, they wanted their children to learn
English because it is viewed as the language of social mobility. What
many don’t understand is to get to English, you first need to know
very well and read in your first language so that you can learn your
English better,” Ocampo said.

Yolanda Quijano, director of the DepEd’s Bureau of Elementary
Education, said that the use of mother tongue in learning allowed
students “to learn, read and write more quickly” and that students
learn a second and a third language more quickly when learning is
first conducted in their first language.

She said both international studies (Thomas and Collier) and local
studies (The Lubuagan Project) “clearly showed the benefits to
children who are educated under an MTB-MLE method and pedagogy.”

“These studies proved that learners who begin in their first language
have more efficient cognitive development and are better prepared for
more cognitively demanding subject matter. In other words, a learner
tends to be smarter if he starts his education using the mother
tongue,” Quijano said.

DepEd officials said it was this “overwhelming evidence” which showed
that the use of mother tongue in early education developed “better and
faster learners” that convinced the department to institutionalize
MTB-MLE.

Bridge program

“Our goal here is to develop lifelong learners who are proficient in
the use of their first language, the national language and other
languages,” said Education Secretary Mona Valisno.

“With more than 150 dialects or first language spoken by learners all
over the country, we really welcome nongovernment organizations who
want to pitch in to make education truly inclusive, especially in
multilingual education,” she added.

According to Valisno, the use of mother tongue from preschool to Grade
3 has been called a “bridge program” because the mother tongue or
first language of the learner was being used as “a bridge to learn a
second or third language, like Filipino or English.”

Educators believe that if a child cannot fully express himself, he is
inhibited to ask more why’s and tend to just keep quiet or just agree
with what the teacher says, Valisno added.

Quijano said the DepEd continued to invest in training teachers in
mother tongue-based multilingual education and had already trained an
“initial 53 teachers in Grades 1, 2 and 3.”

The teachers who were selected based on their proficiency in their
students’ mother tongue, Filipino and English came from Luzon and the
Visayas, she added.

13 textbooks in dialects

Quijano also said that DepEd had partnered with the Summer Institute
of Linguistics, Teacher Education Institutions, the NGO Talaytayan
Inc., and the Translators Association of the Philippines for “a
stronger institutional support” in implementing MTB-MLE.

Ocampo said that to help children from Grades 1 to 3 learn in their
mother tongue, the government needed to render only 13 textbooks in
these dialects.

She added that scientific terms difficult to translate could be
imported from English until Filipino language experts could agree on
their local equivalent.

“For me, it is OK to retain the English term like say, the
parallelogram. I have no issue with that. My issue is for the child to
learn,” she said.

Ocampo said that to see where the bilingual policy in teaching has led
the country, one only had to look at those teachers unable to speak
good English.

“They came from that bilingual education policy. The teachers, who
they’re now saying have Grade II proficiency in English, they came
from that.”

http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/inquirerheadlines/nation/view/20100622-276881/Local-dialects-key-to-global-success

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