Reaction Paper: Bilingual education in Philippines and English Instruction

“The Policy on Bilingual Education aims at the achievement of competence in both Filipino and
English at the national level, through the teaching of both languages and their use as media of
instruction at all levels. The regional languages shall be used as auxiliary languages in Grades I
and II.”

As the bilingual educational system in the Philippines had been implemented since 1974,
Filipino students can either find it easy or difficult to study with other subjects, major or minor,
regardless of the language subjects Filipino and English, through the use of different language,
because Filipino is our national language, and also there are different dialects being spoken by the
people which depends on their location which can be positive in a certain sense that they can
embrace the jeopardy of speaking and understanding different languages and the negative thing
is that they can either be confused on which language the students will use for their own way of
studying. And as a fact, the English language has been a very dominant one as being the medium
of instruction Most likely language can be a determinant towards the mathematical performance
of some students along with the anxiety or confidence presented by the time that they were
taking a certain test when students does not know what a word means or what the whole
problem statement is all about and also with the teacher expectation or Pygmalion effect that
usually interferes with a student’s overall academic performance, because there are instances in
which a student is either good in the usage of the English.

At the present, bilingual education in the Philippines is provided using either English or
Filipino as the language of instruction and a regional language as the auxiliary language of
instruction depending on the subjects of Mathematics, Science, and English taught in English
are low, and the cause of this has been indicated as being a problem with a language of
instruction.
Bilingual education in the Philippines, the use of English in mathematics and science and
Filipino, the national language, in all other subjects is a complex story of postcolonial,
neocolonial, nationalist, and ethnolinguistic ideologies and relationships. Thus, the recent law
mandating the use of the mother tongues as media of instruction (MOI) in early primary years
did not come easy. Called Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE), this recent
linguistic structure of educational provision had to navigate the intricate discursive terrains of
language policy-making in order to find a strategic space from which to articulate alternative
and marginalized visions of education and nation building in the country. This chapter provides
a brief history of the language in education debates in the country, assesses the hits and misses
of bilingual education, and takes stock of the arguments for and against the use of the mother
tongues leading to the promulgation of a comprehensive basic education law which includes
MTB-MLE. In the end, however, languages in education are never just about languages alone;
they are about struggles for power and for contending visions of the nation. MTB-MLE promises
to address different forms of inequities in Philippine society, but ideological and structural
challenges against it are massive and relentless.
The Philippines is an archipelago of 7,107 islands which are categorized broadly into three
geographical divisions: Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao. It is located south of China, east of
Vietnam and northeast of Indonesia. In 2010, the country was estimated to have a population
of 94 million people. There are over 170 distinct languages spoken in the Philippines (Lewis
2009). According to McFarland (2009, p. 132):
The eight largest language groups Tagalog, Cebuano, Ilokano, Hiligaynon, Bikol, Samar-Leyte,
Kapampangan, and Pangasinan account for about 85 per cent of the total population, occupy
most of the lowland areas in the country, and can be said to share a single culture (of course,
with regional variation). The next two largest groups are Maranao and Magindanao, spoken
predominantly by Muslims in Mindanao. The remaining one hundred plus languages are found
mostly in the more remote areas of the country such as the mountainous parts of Luzon and
the less developed areas in Mindanao. Filipino, the national language, is widely spoken. It is the
mother tongue of an estimated 25 million Filipinos.
In the postcolonial era, this ‘American legacy’ of English shaped the landscape in which national
language and bilingual education policies were debated on and carried out. Whatever the form
and substance of language debates at any given point, the politics of language in the Philippines
always featured the tension between English on the one hand and the vernacular languages on
the other. English represented colonial oppression and ideological superiority, as well as
democracy and modernity. The vernacular languages represented barbarism, tribalism and anti-
Americanism, as well as freedom and social justice. This linguistic-cum-ideological tension
found early expression in debates on medium of instruction during the decades of direct
American colonization (Board of Education Survey 1925), and in the need for a national
language in the 1930s as part of the Filipino people’s quest for political independence from the
United States, It will be observed, however, that while the tension between English and the
vernacular languages served as ideological impetus for the emergence of a national language,
the politics of the national language in postcolonial Philippines became more muddled because
of competing claims for legitimacy among warring vernacular language groups in the country. It
is important to understand key junctures in the development of the national language in order
to get a clear picture of how bilingual education in the country came about. The following short
sections will highlight these key junctures

1937: Tagalog established as the national language. The need for a national language for the
Philippines emerged as a political imperative in the 1930s when Philippine independence from
American colonial rule was the central rallying call among Filipinos, especially Filipino
politicians. It was a tumultuous decade leading to the Philippines’ political independence in
1942 The National Language Institute was established in 1937 through Commonwealth Act No.
184, better known as the Romualdez Law. Among the competing Philippine languages, Tagalog
became the basis of the national language for many possible reasons, including the fact that it
was the language spoken by most of the national leaders including then Philippine President
Manuel Quezon. Also, the seat of political government was (and still is) in Manila in Central
Luzon, the region in which the majority of people spoke Tagalog as a mother tongue.

1959: Tagalog renamed as ‘Pilipino’. Because of the choice of Tagalog as the national language,
the politics of language took on an ethnolinguistic dimension At the time, Bisaya, the language
spoken in Central Visayas and in many parts of Mindanao, was numerically greater than Tagalog
leading to accusations of Tagalog imperialism or internal colonization.2 It was precisely because
of the political sensitivity about Tagalog as the national language that it was renamed Pilipino in
1959 through a memorandum from the Department of Education.
1973: Pilipino ceased to be the national language. During the debates in the national assembly
for the purpose of rewriting the Philippine Constitution in 1973, ethnolinguistic rivalries flared
up again when the national language issue was deliberated. Because of different levels of
compromise among political leaders in the national assembly, Pilipino ceased to be the national
language of the country. Instead, Section 3.2 of Article XV of the 1973 Philippine constitution
stated that: The National Assembly shall take steps towards the development and formal
adoption of a common national language to be known as Filipino.
Perhaps the bilingual Education in the Philippines that has been engendered by the new
challenge of the mother tongues is the move away from framing the issues within the
English/Filipino debate and questions concerning the national language. For example, if the
mother tongues are the most effective media of instruction, specifically at primary school
levels, bilingual education through the use of English and Filipino (except for those whose
mother tongue is Filipino) has not been the most effective means of educating Filipino children.
Consequently, Filipino as medium of instruction has been stripped of its basic premise that it is
– as a mother tongue – superior to English and therefore should be a medium of instruction for
Filipino children across all ethnolinguistic groups. The emerging framing of the issues is now
moving towards English vis-à-vis or against the mother tongues, and not English vis-à-vis or
against the national language. In the process, this ‘new’ politics of language in the country
grounds itself in a different, but perhaps more realistic, premise: the Philippines is a multilingual
and multicultural country. This may sound commonsensical but this has not been so within the
framework of bilingual education. For a long time, the tension between English and the national
language obscured the role of the mother tongues in educational and social development. A
different vision of education puts the mother tongues at the center of the educational process
with the hope that a new educational landscape becomes more effective, inclusive and just.