Nanung epektu na? (What’s the effect?): impact of mother tongue-based multilingual education (MTB-MLE) policy on language use and language attitudes of 5th graders in Pampanga, the Philippines

In 2012, the Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE) policy, which advocates the use of mother tongues as the language of instruction from kindergarten to year three, was implemented in the Philippines.However, issues regarding the impact of this policy on the language use and the language attitudes of the students exposed to it remain unexplored.Utilizing the Domain Analysis Framework of Fishman (1968) and a quantitative design, this study examined the language use and the language attitudes of Kapampangan 5 th graders in relation to the MTB-MLE policy.The results show that Kapampangan 5 th graders use the Filipino and the Kapampangan languages in both the home and the education domains and that they have positive attitudes toward these languages.Furthermore, the analysis suggests that the MTB-MLE policy has a positive impact on the language use and the language attitudes of the learners.They seem to favor the use of Filipino, the national language, over Kapampangan, their mother tongue, which is a possible indication of language shift.