How increased partnership between schools and language communities could improve outcomes for students being taught in an unfamiliar language

• In Event: Supporting language learners in the classroom

Proposal

In the Philippines, strong language-in-education policies (Congress of the Philippines, 2013; Department of Education, 2009) provide the opportunity for all students to learn in their home language from Kindergarten through Grade 3 and for initial literacy to be taught in the same language. However, it is common for regional languages and other lingua franca to be used as media of instruction in situations where the assigned teacher does not speak students’ home language and/or appropriate learning materials have not been developed in the students’ home language (Lartec et al., 2014). Regional languages are also used in urban, multilingual areas, where there is the added complexity of multi-language classrooms in which students don’t share one home language (Nolasco, 2015; Benson and Young, 2016).

Students from non-dominant language (NDL) communities, in particular, are likely to be taught in an unfamiliar regional language. SIL Philippines has provided technical assistance to the Department of Education for implementing L1-based multilingual education in NDL communities.

Recent participatory research (Schell, 2018) in one such non-dominant language community revealed that parents and community leaders believe the best way to support learners from their community is through increased partnership between the school and NDL community, including community involvement in the classroom. This presentation will explore challenges arising from linguistic complexity in a classroom setting and the resultant educational barriers identified through participatory research. In response, potential interventions to address these challenges and, thus, support NDL-speaking students will be presented, including practical actions that can be taken by parents, classroom teachers, school administrators, policy makers, and NGOs.

The presentation will conclude with a survey of initial outcomes from approaches that are currently being tried and tested in the Philippines for supporting NDL students in the classroom through increased partnership between the school and language community.

Authors

• Kate Schell, SIL

• Catherine Young, SIL International