Book

Description

Filipinos are born multilingual with 171 living languages (Mondez, 2013), and multilingualism may affect the learners' spelling ability in their first language. Though it is our nature to commit  mistakes, especially in spelling, grammarians and linguists set rules to follow but according to Dordev (2015), the orthographic rules cannot be learned without practice, and they should be introduced in the educational process at the beginning of elementary school because spelling plays a vital role in written communication and one mistake in spelling may lead to  misunderstanding. Therefore, the Department of Education (DepEd) implemented the Mother Tongue-Based-Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE) which states that starting School Year (SY) 2012-2013, MTB-MLE  shall be implemented in all public schools, specifically in Kindergarten, Grades 1, 2, and 3. This implementation was based on different studies which show that students who learned new  concepts using their mother tongue have been proven more competent in all areas of study, although this may be true, it also shows that what may work in one region or one place may not  apply to all other places with different environments, demands, and needs that must be met. Moreover, this study used the eight major orthographical errors by Cook (2004), these are; (1) insertion/addition, (2) omission (3) substitution (4) transposition (inversion) (5) grapheme (6) word space (7) capital (8) others. The researchers chose the third-year BEEd students to be the participants to know if the future teachers are also aware of the spelling of their L1 because as future elementary teachers, they may be teaching MTB – MLE in the future.