Alphabet primer as mother tongue-based multilingual education supplementary instructional material

Abstract

This study aims to develop MTB-MLE instructional material such as alphabet primer for the use of Grade 1 pupils in Iyakan language and to test its effectiveness. 100 pupils (Grade 1) participated in the study from a selected public elementary school in a particular city and province in Mindanao, Philippines. The study used a one-group pre-test-post-test design where the worksheets were taken from the Iyakan Alphabet Primer as instruments. Experts in mother-tongue education and members of the community validated and critiqued the alphabet primer. The results of the study demonstrated that the alphabet primer may be tailored to meet the needs of students at the Grade 1 level. Word identification, alphabet knowledge, spelling knowledge, and handwriting are all areas where the learners have shown substantial improvement. The findings suggest that the mother-tongue alphabet primer has potential as a means of raising students’ achievement. Based on the findings, it is suggested that the developed alphabet primer book be used as a supplementary resource for teachers of MTB-MLE with the Iyakan language as L1, that additional teaching guides be created to support teachers in the classroom, that more instructional materials in the first or local languages be created and used in the classrooms, and that the alphabet primer be translated into other dialects or languages in the city or province to maximize their use.