SOME COMPETING GOALS IN ABORIGINAL LANGUAGE PLANNING

I agree with what Paul black said that language planners and educators should not be
deciding between two competing view, but rather should be helping the groups involved come to
better understanding of their own and each others views in the hope of being able to reach
consensus. Language planning is not easy and will always undergo different conflicting views
but instead of arguing and competing, language planners should listen to different views raised
and reach a consensus.
The implementation of Mother Tongue Based Education in the Philippines also resulted
to different competing views. While the government strongly supports the implementation of
mother tongue based education, there are others who are also against it.
Citing a speech by Luis Enrique Lpez, Dutcher (2001) outlines five major reasons
why MTBE should be promoted (p. 9). First, with MTBE, young learners develop strong L1
competencies. Those learners perform well in all subjects. They develop a higher level of selfesteem. They develop a solid foundation on which all additional languages can be built if the
students want to learn an additional language. Last, MTBE promotes more participation of the
parents and community in the school activities. In the case of the Philippines, however, this may
not necessary be as attractive as it sounds because one classroom can easily have the
representation of more than five linguistic backgrounds. MTBE seems to be more challenging in
such multilingual settings (Ghimire, 2012), unlike settings where both students and
teachers share the same local language (Kang, 2012). In fact, while long-term effects of
MTBE may have been proven in Western countries, it has not been clearly conclusive in
countries of the South (D. Malone, 2008).
In the case of MTB-MLE in the Philippines, Mahboob and Cruz (2013)believe that
due to the last century that was mainly focused on English instruction, this new policy is
a major paradigm shift. According to them, the success of MTB-MLE will highly depend
on the change in attitude towards languages. This is a conclusion they reached after their
study revealed some positive attitude towards the MTB-MLE policy.

T Despite the many benefits outlined for MTBE, it also presents some drawbacks (S.
Malone & Paraide, 2011; Oyzon & Fullmer, 2014; Wa-Mbaleka, 2014) that can not be
ignored in this discussion. First, instructional materials are not readily available in the
majority of local languages. Second, teachers are not trained in the local languages used for
instruction where they teach. Third, primary school teachers may not have solid training on L1
or L2 learning research and theories. Fourth, some local languages may not be perceived
as important for formal education. Last, parents may see MTBE as a disadvantage for
future

employability where English is highly valued. All these are major issues that any

government promoting a MTBE.

MTBE policy must take into consideration. Ignoring any of them can certainly lead to
certain failure. Although a strong proponent of MTB-MLE and although optimistic about the
success of this policy in the Philippines, Nolasco (2008) concluded that the road to multiliteracy and multilingual education in the Philippines will be a difficult and tortuous one.
Challenges mentioned above are easily seen in many places around the nation
today. The turmoil is already happening. The future of MTB-MLE, however, will be
determined by how the Philippine government is able to handle the turmoil.
I agree with one of the competing goals mentioned in the article which is the bilingual
education and language maintenance. Although it has been proven that bilingual education can
improve the overall educational achievement of the children involved, it might be in conflict
with the language maintenance of the aborigines. In the article, adults recognize that the children
speak kriol but they would rather see devoted to teaching children their traditional languages to
children.
It is true that bilingual education in the Philippines can sacrifice the language
maintenance of the traditional language of different ethnic groups. Take for example the
Philippines which comprise 171 spoken languages. Because of the dominance of the use of
English language, there are many Filipinos now who do not even speak or know how to speak
their traditional language. In the study of Villanueva, she learned that many Subanen children do
not speak their language and ashamed to use their language. In other words, they themselves
have negative attitudes towards their own language.

I am not surprised that aboriginal people consider it important to learn English for this is
true in other more powerful countries. English is spoken as a second or foreign language by an
estimated 950 million people worldwide (Saville-Troike, 2006). This is in addition to the 427
million native speakers of English.
Language planners face different conflicting goals in language planning. When they do,
they should not decide between such conflicting goals. Indeed it is true that what they need to do
is work closely with their clients to gain a clear idea of their situation and to help them become
better able to assess possible goals and consequences for themselves.