Role Of Language In The Philippines

Language plays a very important role in the day to day living of people. According to Frey (2016), “Language is the thread that holds our culture together”. It’s an important medium in creating connections with others. Through language, friendships, love between families and even romantic love happen. You can even know other country and get involved with the culture that they have through language for as the famous saying says, “Language is passport to another world”. In 2009, there are 6,909 distinct languages in the world. 2 1097 of these are spoken in Asia and these are not all uniformly distributed around the world (Anderson, 2012).Among these thousands of language that exist in the world, the native languages are most used. These native

This is because during childhood, parents use English or Filipino when talking to their children and also in schools. Many linguistic groups are becoming vocal about the need to ensure that the youngest members of their communities keep their linguistic heritage so some governments that include the Philippines, have established language-in-education policies that embrace children’s first languages. This is why UNESCO has encouraged mother tongue instruction in primary education since 1953 (UNESCO, 1953). Teachers’ medium in teaching is the mother tongue of their pupils widely used in the area. UNESCO highlights the advantages of mother tongue education right from the start: children are more likely to enroll and succeed in school (Kosonen, 2005); parents are more likely to communicate with teachers and participate in their children’s learning (Benson, 2002); and children in multilingual education tend to develop better thinking skills compared to their monolingual peers (e.g., Bialystok, 2001; Cummins, 2000; King & Mackey, 2007). Through this program children can widen their knowledge and help them more in understanding the lessons they learn inside their classrooms at the same time, they help in promoting the native languages to not be set aside or forgotten. The teachers from the kinder garden to grade three shall use MTB-MLE. Mother Tongue Based MLE refers to the use of student’s Mother tongue as a language of instruction in school. MT-based MLE includes four languages—the students’ mother tongue or first language, a regional language, the national language and an international