THE READING PERFORMANCE OF LEARNERS IN MOTEHR-TONGUE IN THE COUNTRYSIDE AREA OF THE PHILIPPINES

With the implementation of Mother-Tongue Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE) under the Enhanced Basic Education Act of 2013 and the lack of contextualized and localized teachers guide and learners materials has motivated the researcher to pursue this study which aimed to determine the reading performance of learners in mother-tongue. The respondents of the study were comprised of 312 grade 3 pupils from all the central schools in the Schools Division of Eastern Samar during the First Grading Period of the School Year 2021-2022. This study used descriptive design. Results of the study revealed that the reading performance of learners in mother-tongue showed that the learners are advanced in terms of segmental sounds compared to supra-segmental sounds. This means that the lack of system of writing for the Waray language, lack of vocabulary lists, lack of assessment and validation tools for reading materials, lack of grammar materials/explanation, and lack of proper contextualized and localized learners materials affected the learners reading performance when dealing with complicated supra-segmental sounds. This study proved that even if teachers had a very satisfactory performance indicator, but there is a lack of development in contextualized and localized strategic intervention materials in MTB-MLE for local Waray language, particularly the Waray language used in Eastern Samar, there is still a language barrier between the teachers and pupils in understanding lessons taught in their respective school.