How does early educational quality affect longer-term academic outcomes? We shed light on this question via a natural experiment in the Philippines--the implementation of a mother tongue education policy in public schools in kindergarten to Grade 3. This policy led to an unexpected decline in educational quality, but differentially in a subset of…

This paper is an initial attempt to characterise the schoolscape of a four-century old higher education institution in the Philippines and the oldest existing university in Asia, The Royal, Catholic, and Pontifical University of Santo Tomas (UST). Through a systematic inventory of 2,410 visual signs, the analysis of the functional sign…

Purpose: This article examines the use of English medium instruction (EMI) for teaching Japanese as a foreign language (JFL) by non-native speakers with a focus on multilingual classrooms. It also explores teachers' positive and negative beliefs about using EMI in classroom settings for JFL instruction. Methods and procedure: 274 non-native…

This study investigated the connection between translanguaging and reading comprehension of Filipino ESL intermediate learners. The respondents were intermediate pupils enrolled in the selected central schools in Bicol, Philippines. The respondents' ages range from 8 to 12 years old, and 124 students (27.55%) were males while 326 students (72.44%)…

To address the challenges of teaching and learning among multilingual elementary students, the Philippines, a multilingual country with over 180 languages, implemented the Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE). Studies on the use of mother tongue have reported positive results among students who share a common language. However, in…

The implementation of the Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE) policy in the Philippine basic education has gained traction among educators. Skepticism as to its effectiveness is evident especially in mathematics class where English is the universally recognised medium. This study explored how elementary teachers from a rural…

The Philippines is held as one of the largest English-speaking countries worldwide with most of its people possessing at least some degree of fluency in the target language. The prestige of the English language in this country has attracted the attention of many foreign students including Indonesian. In this paper, we aimed to discuss the…

Language-in-education policy becomes a recent tendentious concern in the context of the Philippines as it has recently adopted the Mother Tongue-based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE). Moreover, Baker (1992) claimed that language attitude is a main and vital component of policy and planning. Therefore, this research primarily purposes to determine…

At the turn of the twentieth century, the Philippine archipelago transitioned from nearly 400 years of colonial occupation under the Spanish to imperial occupation under the Americans. This analysis interrogates the dynamics through which the heterogeneous languages of the Philippine archipelago were maintained alongside state-sanctioned languages…

The need to connect with learners is essential to successfully transfer learning. Thus, the medium of instruction plays a very important role. One indicator that would tell us if success is attained in teaching various subject areas is also influenced by the medium of instruction which is employed in the classroom. It is on this premise that the…

This descriptive observational study examined the implementation of Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB MLE) language policy to the classroom practices of a grade three multilingual classroom in the Philippines. The constructive alignment of the said language policy implementation was evaluated in terms of: (1) Mother Tongue (MT) as a…

This study aimed to examine the types of Tagalog-English code-switching used in mathematics classroom discourse. Four purposively selected tertiary level math teachers in a college situated in a rural area in the Philippines were part of the study. Using a qualitative approach, data were gathered through non-participant class observations and…

This paper shall describe the bridging strategies used by Grades 3 and 4 English teachers from schools in two regions in the Philippines to help their multilingual students transition from using the mother tongue as medium of instruction in the different subject areas to using English in the English classroom. Data were obtained through…

In 2009 the Philippines introduced a mother tongue-based multilingual education language policy requiring the "mother tongue" as the language of instruction (LOI) in kindergarten through grade 3. Using teacher classroom language data collected from four LOI groups in 2019, we compared the frequency of teachers' use of the target LOI in…

Language-in-education policy becomes a recent tendentious concern in the context of the Philippines as it has recently adopted the Mother Tongue-based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE). Moreover, Baker (1992) claimed that language attitude is a main and vital component of policy and planning. Therefore, this research primarily purposes to determine…