Oral Language Development in the Philippine Kindergarten Curriculum: Revisiting the Competencies, Identifying Strengths and Gaps and Drafting Recommendations

Abstract

The significant role of oral language (OL) in the early years and its impact on other developmental domains is well-documented. Since a high percentage of Filipino learners are not exhibiting literacy skills at their level, it is within this context that this research examined how OL development is expressed in the national kindergarten curriculum guide (KCG). We specifically sought to determine: the OL components evident in three early language and literacy reference documents and the OL components highlighted in the KCG. Curriculum mapping was undertaken in this research. The findings indicate that the reference documents generally reflected all the linguistic components at varying proportions with semantics as highly present. The 73 KCG competencies tapped all the language components with pragmatics and semantics as highly evident. More than half of the competencies were classified under two or more language components which provides evidence for the interrelatedness of these components. Almost half of the KCG competencies were classified under expressive language while 21% were identified as receptive skills. The informative function of language was highly evident at 72.6% while other functions were present at 12.33% and below. Gaps, strengths, and recommendations for the KCG were presented in this paper.