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…

Higher education institutions in the Philippines are directed to teach mathematics in only English or Filipino, implying that code-switching for instruction is neither promoted nor encouraged despite teachers' and students' multilingualism. This is true for other multilingual countries with English as an official language. However, literature…

This paper revisits the main thoughts of the Filipino historian and social critic Renato Constantino on the role of education in the formation of a neocolonial and postcolonial consciousness. It suggests that Constantino's critical stance towards education embodies a type of philosophizing about education that centers on the problematization of…

Drawing on Sutton and Levinson's Socio-cultural Approach to policy, this study explores the experiences and collective language beliefs of 25 teachers implementing the Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTBMLE) policy in two urban Philippine school districts. Mixed methods were used to understand policy enactment and teacher perspectives.…

This study investigates the impact of Filipina domestic workers (FilDWs), a marginalized group in Hong Kong (HK), on HK children's language development. It focusses on FilDWs' influence on the second language (L2) English of bilingual HK primary school children attending an English Medium of Instruction school. The elements investigated are L2…

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…

In this article, we visualize a framework of the intersectionality of literacy, spatial justice, and multimodality in teaching literacy to Filipino Deaf students. We propose a metaphor-based framework and discuss how it can be used in teaching literacy to Filipino Deaf students through classroom examples as well as suggestions and recommendations…

The study aimed to investigate the impact of Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE) on students' writing skills in their first language (L1), Tagalog, and explore whether their proficiency in L1 contributes to their second language (L2) writing. This study employed a conceptual framework based on language acquisition and bilingual…

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%)…

The Philippines has had numerous language policies in education--from Spanish to English to the current mother tongue-based multilingual education (MTB-MLE) policy. The MTB-MLE is a controversial language policy that faced many challenges before and during its implementation. Eight years into its implementation, however, the policy has not been…

Despite longitudinal studies conducted along written and oral codeswitching linguistic prevalence considering ESL context, none of the ensuing studies has attempted to propose a theory delineating the preceding occurrence committed by L2 interlocutors which add to the novelty aspect of this paper. The quantitative analysis redounds to the…

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…

This study aimed at investigating the effects of teachers' personal and professional demographic characteristics on students' academic performance in English. To achieve this aim, the researcher used a sample of 37 English secondary teachers and 400 students in the District of Plaridel, Schools Division Office of Bulacan during the academic year…

The Philippine historical accounts show that Indigenous Peoples (IPs) in the Philippines have long been suffering from discrimination and lack of access to Education. The IPs comprise about 10% to 20% of the Philippines's 102.9 million total populations. The Philippine educational system's neo-colonial background creates injustice on some cultural…