In grade school in the Philippines, particularly those outside the Tagalog-speaking regions, it’s really not at all uncommon for the same teacher to use Filipino, English, and the mother tongue of the school’s locality to teach the various academic subjects. As far as I can remember, this was the grade-school teaching scenario until the late 1950s or early 1960s, and it has just been reinstituted under a new government education circular that mandates the use of the mother tongue in grade-school teaching. In that context, this three-language teaching mode is not really new under the sun.
It should be obvious though that then and now, this teaching mode could only be effective if the teacher is (a) knowledgeable and conversant with both the Tagalog language, which is basically today’s Filipino, as well as with the particular mother tongue of the locality, like Cebuano, Ilocano, or Bicol, (b) knowledgeable and adequately conversant with English as well, and (c) competent and qualified to teach all the other grade-school academic subjects. If so, then the teacher shouldn’t find it difficult to effectively teach all the grade-school academic subjects using all three required languages. The only possible drawback to this teaching arrangement I could think of is if the qualified and competent teacher assigned to a particular grade-school class doesn’t speak the mother tongue of the locality. This shouldn’t happen in the highly populated Tagalog-speaking provinces, of course, since the mother tongue there is Filipino itself and there’s no need for the teacher to be proficient in another regional tongue. Neither would this happen anywhere else in the Philippines if only teachers knowledgeable in the mother tongue on top of Filipino and English are hired to teach in grade school.
This being the case, I see no basis at all for the conclusion that grade-school teachers would find it difficult to teach today under the new government mandate to teach using the mother tongue in addition to Filipino and English, and for the corollary conclusion that all of the pupils to be taught in this manner would have to be intelligent to learn under this teaching mode. This conclusion is a non sequitur—an inference that doesn’t follow from the premises. Indeed, then as now, the effectiveness of teaching and the quality of learning would still fundamentally depend on the qualifications, competence, and language capabilities of the grade-school teacher.
