Use of mother tongue as medium of instruction ends

FILE PHOTO: Public school teacher Ivy Catungal gives instruction to her students at San Diego Elementary School in Batasan Hills, Quezon City. – Republic Act (RA) No. 12027 or the Act of Discontinuing the Use of the Mother Tongue as Medium of Instruction from Kindergarten to Grade 3 lapsed into law on Thursday, October 11, 2024. INQUIRER/GRIG C. MONTEGRANDE

MANILA, Philippines — A measure that will discontinue the use of the mother tongue as a medium of instruction from Kindergarten to Grade 3 lapsed into law on Thursday, October 11.

Republic Act (RA) No. 12027 or the Act of Discontinuing the Use of the Mother Tongue as Medium of Instruction from Kindergarten to Grade 3 amends Sections 4 and 5 of RA No. 10533 or the Enhanced Basic Education Act of 2013, which mandates that teaching assessment for Kindergarten up to Grade 3 students shall be taught in regional or native language and that the curriculum must conform to the Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE).

Under RA 12027, “[t]he medium of instruction shall revert to Filipino and until otherwise provided by law, English,” while the regional languages will serve as a supplementary media of instruction for the students.

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It also provides optional implementation in monolingual classes, or a group of learners who speak the same mother tongue and are enrolled in the same grade level of a school year.

Mother tongue

Section 2 of RA 12027 states that the framework of MTB-MLE in monolingual classes can be applied in monolingual classes given that the mother tongue to be used as a medium of instruction follows the following requirements:

• Official orthography developed and published by the Komisyon ng Wikang Filipino (KWF);
• Official documented vocabulary published by KWF
• Availability of teachers in the school who speak and are trained to teach in the mother tongue

RA 12027 likewise mandates that the “Department of Education [DepEd] shall conduct a review of the optional implementation of the MTB-MLE Program in monolingual classes” three years after the effectivity of the law.

It further tasks DepEd to develop a mapping policy after a year of the law’s effectivity to assess and classify learners based on their native language “to systematically determine the existence of monolingual classes per school year.”

RA 12027 shall take effect 15 days after its publication in the Official Gazette.