By Estanislao Albano, Jr.
One of the favorite arguments of multilingual education advocates is the findings by international studies specially Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) that countries whose medium of instruction is the language they use at home perform much better in Mathematics and Science in the assessment. So convinced was the Department of Education (DepEd) that in DepEd Order No. 74, series of 2009, which institutionalized the MTB-MLE, it cited a local study which validate the finding in effect including better performance in Mathematics and Science in international studies among the expected benefits of the policy.
It was therefore like a bolt of lightning from a clear blue sky when it was announced last December 9 that the country landed in the bottom of the 2019 TIMSS which is three rungs beneath our Grade 4 pupils who took the test in 2003, the only other time we joined the Grade 4 test. The products of the MTB-MLE program were outscored by 61 or 17.03 percent in Mathematics (297 to 358) and 83 or 25 percent in Science (249 to 332) by their Bilingual Education Policy (BEP) counterparts in 2003. (“TIMSS 2003 International Mathematics Report” “TIMSS 2003 International Science Report,” “TIMSS 2019 International Results in Mathematics and Science”)
What DepEd and other believers of the theory that Mother Tongue would change out fortunes in international assessments overlooked is the fact that those countries identified by the TIMSS to be performing well in the study which are found to be instructing their learners in their native tongues also make sure their children are able readers starting in Grade 1 or perhaps even earlier. In contrast, our pupils have just been reading in English, our test language, a little over a year during the exams because with the adoption of the MTB-MLE, the teaching of English reading is no longer done in Grade 1 but only starts in the second semester of Grade 2 to be continued in Grade 3.
And that is for our examinees who have learned to read. How about those who have not?
According to the report of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the Southeast Asia Ministers of Education Organization (SEAMEO) on the results of the 2019 Southeast Asia Primary Learning Metrics (SEA-PLM), an assessment survey on reading, writing and mathematical literacy of Grade 5 pupils in the region, 27 percent of the Filipino examinees could not read based on the SEA-PLM definition of reading literacy. The report states that the subject pupils are “still at the stage of matching single words to an image of a familiar object or concept” and the SEA-PLM defines reading literacy as “understanding, using and responding to a range of written texts, in order to meet personal, societal, economic and civic needs.” . (“SEA-PLM 2019 Main Regional Report Children Learning in 6 Southeast Asian countries” Pages 41-44)
Naturally, Grade 4 has higher non-reader incidence than Grade 5 and then add to the number the struggling readers then our dismal performance in the TIMSS should not come as a surprise
Granting that the findings of international and local studies that students taught in Mathematics and Science in their language at home do better in the subjects, obviously, the correlation did not work for us in the TIMSS and SEA-PLM – we were fourth of six countries in the SEA-PLM in mathematics literacy – because more than one fourth of our examinees could not read. This is a glaring and sad irony because DepEd Order No. 74, series of 2009, makes the following claims for the MTB-MLE:
“First, learners learn to read more quickly when in their first language (LI);
Second, pupils who have learned to read and write in their first language learn to speak, read, and write in a second language (L2) and third language (L3) more quickly than those who are taught in a second or third language first..”
Clearly, something is amiss. Paging DepEd which has been conspicuously quiet on the non-reader data from the SEA-PLM and the demolition in the 2019 TIMSS of the implied promise that the MTB-MLE will improve our performance in international assessment. With the complete gutting of the list of alleged advantages of the MTB-MLE midway into the ninth year of implementation, the DepEd owes the country an explanation as to what’s going on specially so that the language policy is currently under review. **
