I.

Introduction

The Philippines, located in Southeast Asia, is an archipelago with 7,107 islands covering a total
land area of 300,780 square kilometers, and lies between the Philippine Sea and the South China Sea,
east of Vietnam. There are three main island groups: Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao. The country is a
sovereign island country and is officially known as the Republic of the Philippines. Economically, the
Philippines is recently identified as among the most robust and stable economies in the region, thanks to
the large remittances from 4 to 5 million overseas Filipino workers (OFWs), its growing business process
outsourcing industry and local infrastructure projects. Economic growth has accelerated, averaging 6.0%
per year from 2011-2014, compared with 4.5% in the previous years. However, unemployment remains
high at around 7% of the population, and underemployment is nearly 20%. At least 40% of the employed
are working in the informal sector. Poverty afflicts a quarter of the population. With a population of
100,998,376according to a July 2015 estimate, the Philippines ranks 13th among the most populated
countries in the world.

The Philippines ranks as the sixth country in the world with the most number of languages —
193. Of that number, 182 are indigenous. The public school system introduced by the American colonial
government in early 1900s imposed English as the official medium of instruction. Years after the
Philippine independence, experiments were undertaken to use the vernacular in the early grades. In the
1970s, the national language Filipino (a derivative of Tagalog) was added to English as an official
language of instruction. In 2009, Mother Tongue Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE) was
institutionalized which allowed the use of the Child’s Mother tongue in education. Two years later, MTB-
MLE was piloted in more than 900schools. The following year, 2012, it was mainstreamed in all 43,000
public schools in the Philippines.

Language situation

Philippine languages belong to the broader umbrella of the Austronesian language family which
is among the most widespread covering more than halfway around the globe, consisting of 1,000 to
1,200 distinct languages found from Madagascar in the west to Eastern Island in the east (Bellwood, Fox
& Tryon, 2006). These languages, like the cultures they represent, are not fixed but are constantly
changing—their vocabularies, grammar, and pronunciation. The speech communities diverge, as they
borrow from non-Austronesian languages like Spanish and English to become dialects of the same
language or would constitute two different languages. There is a consensus that the first Austronesians
came from Taiwan and moved to many places. There are hypotheses about the branching out of the
Austronesian language family into subgroups. It was once generally believed that languages in the
Philippines belong to a single Philippine subgroup but this was questioned due to the different features
of some languages in the south (Tyron,2006).The Philippines is known as a multilingual nation with more
than 182 indigenous languages and 11 foreign languages. According to the 2000 Philippines census, the
biggest Philippine languages based on the number of native speakers are: Tagalog 21.5 million;
Cebuano18.5 million; Ilokano 7.7 million; Hiligaynon 6.9 million; Bicol 4.5 million; Waray 3.1 million;
Kapampangan 2.3 million; Pangasinan 1.5 million; Kinaray-a 1.3 million; Tausug 1 million; Meranao 1
million; and Maguindanao 1 million. It is estimated that around 15% of the languages are spoken by
nearly 90% of the population, but there is no single indigenous language spoken by the majority of
people. There are claims that Filipino (a variant of Tagalog spoken mostly in the capital city of Manila)
has become virtually the national lingua franca (though there is also a counterclaim that it is only the
lingua franca of the mass media) and Ilokano, Cebuano and Hiligaynon are the lingua franca in the
regions. English is also a second language or L2 to most Filipinos. According to the Social Weather
Stations, in 2008, about three fourths of Filipino adults(76%) said they could understand spoken English
and a little more than half (61%) said they could write English. A code-switching language variety
involving English and Tagalog called “Tag-lish” has also become an “informal lingua franca”. A typical
Filipino can speak several languages usually his mother tongue and regional lingua franca. If he goes to
school he can add two or more languages, Filipino and English, making him quadri-lingual.

From an ideological and historical view, the language issue in the Philippines has been highly
volatile and debatable. Different groups with their own agenda have been constantly jostling to
influence policies and programs. There were fleeting moments of stability and convergence among
these groups and in one of such moments, MTB-MLE found a space to flourish.

Language policy in education

This section discusses the language policy in schools starting when the public school system was
introduced in the 1900s. As early as 1900, there were recommendations to use the local languages
(called dialects that time) in view of the high rate (75%) of attrition and the same recommendation was
submitted in 1907, 1925 and 1936 for deliberation and debates among policymakers but such proposal
did not prosper and English remained the medium of instruction in classroom and even in the
playground (Isidro, 1949).

The proposal to use the “dialects” in 1925 was raised by Monroe Commission which was tasked
by the American colonial government to review the state of education to explain the reasons why the
Filipino pupils were not at par in academic performance compared to their counterpart in America. The
Commission conducted intensive research and at the end recommended among many things the use of
local languages in education.

During the transitional Commonwealth Government and the ratification of the

1935Constitution, Tagalog was identified as the national language of the Philippines. Consequently,
Executive Order No. 263 was issued in 1940 to require teaching of the national language in all public and
private secondary school level and teachers’ colleges. Three years later, the teaching of Tagalog would
begin at the elementary level. This was during the World War 2 when the Japanese military leader that
ruled the country prohibited the use of English.
After the war, a new language policy was signed in 1957 by the Board of National Education which
states, the medium of instruction in the first two grades of the elementary school shall be the local
vernacular; that at the same time the national language (named Pilipino in 1959) shall be taught
informally beginning in Grade I and given emphasis as a subject in the higher grades; that English shall
be taught as a subject in Grades I and II and used as medium of instruction beginning in Grade III.

In 1974, during the Martial Law Period, the Department of Education Culture and Sports issued
DECS Order No. 25, s 1974 called Bilingual Education Program which assigned subjects(Social Studies,
Character Education, Music, Health and Physical Education) that will be taught in the national language,
Tagalog (called Pilipino that time) and the rest in English from primary to secondary level. After the
People Power Revolution, the 1987 Constitution was ratified. DECS Order No. 52, s. 1987 reiterated the
previous Bilingual Education Policy, however the national language is no longer called Tagalog or
Pilipino, but Filipino. Being the national language, it should be enriched by all Philippine languages.

Separate from the nationwide policies on language of learning were specific experiments in
some places that studied the use of the local languages in bilingual education. These studies were
described in Quijano (2010) and McEachern (2013)

●Iloilo experiments (1948-54; 1961-64) by Dr. Jose Aguilar, a Superintendent of the public school
system. It involved the use of Hiligaynon, a major language in the Visayan Region in grades 1 & 2.

●Cebu Experiment (pre-1960’s). this study involved using the Cebuano (or Binisaya)

language in teaching Social Studies.

●Antique Experiment (1952). This utilized a three language-in-education models with different amounts
of vernacular use.

●Rizal Experiment (1960-66) The purpose of this experiment is to determine the best time to start
introducing English as a subject and medium of instruction in a Tagalog medium class.

●First Language Component-Bridging Program (FLC-BP): 1986-93. This is a project in Ifugao province that
used Tuwali as medium of instruction. It was led by DepEd Supervisor Dr. Jeronimo Codamon along with
consultants from SIL and Translators Association of the Philippines.

●Lingua Franca Project: 1999-2001. There were 32 schools that participated in all regions. Three main
lingua franca Tagalog, Ilokano, or Cebuano were used as medium of instruction in Grades 1 and 2.