Amorphous language as alternative model for multilingual education in the Philippines

Abstract

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 and theoretical challenges. Unless an alternative language model accompanies MTB-MLE, its prospects for success remain bleak. While the directive is emancipatory, it fails to optimise this possibility due to serial monolingualism. Employing Michel de Certeau’s work on the practice of everyday life, the paper proposes amorphous language as an alternative model to serial monolingualism and contributes to the theorisation of translanguaging as a tactic in a language classroom.