In 2009, the Department of Education of the Philippines released a directive to use the mother tongue as a medium of instruction from kindergarten to third grade. Among Southeast Asian countries, the Philippines pioneered the formal adaption of mother tongue-based multilingual education (MTB-MLE). However, the policy is beset with both structural…

The U.S. government encourages the study of critical languages spoken in geographic areas of strategic importance to U.S. national security and the global economy through a variety of discretionary grants and scholarship programs. U.S. students are traditionally underrepresented in the study of these languages; however, many of the nation's K-12…

The alternation of Tagalog and English in informal discourse is a feature of the linguistic repertoire of educated, middle- and upper-class Filipinos. This paper describes the linguistic structure and sociolinguistic functions of Tagalog-English code switching (Taglish) as provided by various researchers through the years. It shows that the…

Describes the multilingual situation underlying the educational scheme in the Philippines, a system inherent with problems arising from the unequal developmental status of Filipino and English and the subsequent failure to meet manpower and material needs. The article issues a call to use the synergy created by two languages. Bajunid's response…