Shekinah Jedidiah M. Alima

Senate President Francis “Chiz” G. Escudero inked the law to shift learning instruction modality from Filipino to English last July 23 despite the Philippines’ low global standing on education.

Photo Courtesy of Summer Institute of Linguistics Australia

Senate Bill 2457 also known as Discontinuing the Use of the Mother Tongue as the Medium of Instruction was sponsored by Sen. Sherwin “Win” Gatchalian and approved by the upper house on its third and final reading, the senate announced through a press release.

The law aims to use the English language as the primary mode of instruction from kindergarten to grade three.

Gatchalian believed that the use of the Filipino language is not generally effective when trying to improve the classroom setup with multilingual students.

“Mother tongue as the medium of instruction is not a one-size-fits-all solution for every classroom. It is effective only in monolingual environments where learners are uniformly native speakers of the same mother tongue," Gatchalian said in the press release.

In 2022, the Philippines was named among the countries with ‘learning poverty’ by a World Bank report.

The results revealed that nine out of 10 Filipino children are having comprehension difficulties with a simple reading material.

The education quality was also assessed by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) last 2022 where the Philippines emerged as rank 77 over 81 countries in 2022.