Teaching the Mother Tongue

Instead of wading in the sea and getting myself a tan at the beach, I chose to spend my summer teaching young kids the basics of reading and writing. At first thought it sounds easy since the basics of English is no brainer for me until I had to teach a young girl the basics of Filipino and Cebuano.

She is unlike an ordinary kid who could babble few Tagalog and Cebuano words; her vocabulary words on the languages seem close to zero. It was teaching a new language to a child and that was a big challenge to me.

The apparent reason why her mother wanted her daughter to be tutored in the native language was because of the Mother-Tongue Based teaching scheme to be implemented in the first grade. As I understood it, basic subjects like Science and Math would be taught using these languages. For a girl who only understood English her whole life, the new scheme would be a peril.

Our first meeting was a struggle - she would wander around the room as if showing no interest in the new language. There were moments where she would laugh at the weird sounding words in Filipino.

Eventually, I won her interest by singing Tagalog action songs and telling Cebuano stories. Although she may have not understood every word I said, she enjoyed the melody and the drama in the literature.

I found out that it is indeed possible to engage children in Filipino language without being hard on them. I for one had a hard time learning Filipino because English was my native tongue. Filipino was never my first language. In fact, I had no friends when I started to go to school because I only spoke in English but my constant exposure to free television which featured Filipino shows and Cebuano advertisements helped me. It was also only until I kept on hearing my classmates speak the language when I learned to speak it myself too.

On another note, the MTB teaching scheme promotes our own language which in turn enriches our own culture. When I took Cebuano as an elective in college, I found out that our language is slowly dying. Seldom are families using the Cebuano terminology for older brother (manong/manoy) and older sister (manang/manay) because of the Western influence. With this new scheme, we are giving our children an identity of us as Cebuanos and Filipinos.

Although students whose first language is English will find difficulty in learning Filipino and Cebuano and students whose first language is Cebuano will have a hard time coping up with the tongue twisters of the English language, the end game is clear that we are preparing our children for the world.

We are bilingual people which set us apart from most of the Westerners. We learn English, Cebuano, Tagalog and sometimes even a European or Asian language of our choice. That's how skillful we are as Filipinos. We have the ability to shift from one language to another thus having a brain system that works wonders. We are no ordinary people. Being Filipino does not mean that we are poor or lowly thought of because of our developing country status. We just need time to shine for the world to see.

Now that K + 12 is in full swing and some universities are shifting their calendar as aligned to that abroad, then we are producing globally competitive students who will be ready to represent the country in the field of academics, sciences, engineering, technology and communication. I guess Filipino students will dominate the educational landscape with this big risk. It is when we go out of the country that we learn new things which are ought to be applied to make our nation a better place.

Heights can only be reached globally if we start to know who we are - what we have been through and what we speak; thus let us keep on teaching the mother tongue.