Significance of mother tongue in junior high schools

“MOTHER tongue” is short for Mother Tongue – Based Multilingual Education. It was a program designed by the Department of Education purposely to increase understanding of lessons by the learners. Mother tongues are actually the local dialects spoken in the community where the school is located.

It starts in Kindergarten to Grade three in elementary. So that, if the learners in this level have the sufficient knowledge and ability, the assimilation of knowledge in higher schooling years will not be difficult.

Calinawagan (2017) stated that there are three scenarios; a teacher may face in multilingual education. These are: the local dialect being spoken by majority of the learners, identification and use of regional dialect with special dialect for the minorities and the possibility that more students may understand easily lessons if communicated in another language with wider scope like English or Tagalog. Calinawagan further sought additional training for teachers so that they can use dialects and local materials to be translated into vocabularies or visual aids in the classroom.

However there are studies pointing to disadvantages of mother tongues. Namanya (2017) in a study found out that learners educated in the mother tongue reveals a falling-off in English literacy level. Oluwole (2008) in a study and by using statistical data further stated that there was a significant difference in the performance of students in an instruction that uses multilingual language. Mother tongue influences the poor performance of students in English language.

However, this writer believes that both mother tongue and the language of instruction – Filipino and English, may contribute to the good performance of learners if distributed equally in the methods or strategies of teaching. Although the program was designed for grade one to three, using this approach in the higher level like in junior high school may have a great impact. This conclusion however can be tested in an Action Research to look at the significance of it. Later interviews from learners and with colleagues in the teaching profession support such proposition; that it influences positively the learning outcome. Certainly there are subject matters that must be taught in English specially in the fields of Science and Mathematics, while there are also subject where mother tongue can be appropriately use like in the teaching of Edukasyon sa Pagpapahalaga, Music, Arts, Physical Education, Health and Araling Panlipunan.