Mansaka Tura in ELT: Preserving Indigenous Knowledge Through Contextualized Education

Abstract

Despite growing advocacy for culturally grounded instruction in the Philippines, indigenous literature such as Mansaka Tura—the traditional poetry of the Mansaka people of Maragusan, Davao de Oro—remains largely excluded from tertiary-level English Language Teaching (ELT), leaving a gap in curricula that serve Indigenous communities. To address this gap, this study developed and evaluated a Contextualized Mansaka Poetry Course Pack for the Purposive Communication course. Using a descriptive-evaluative mixed methods design grounded in the Input-Process-Output (IPO) and ASSURE models of teaching, the study first surveyed 115 stakeholders (IP leaders, English instructors, and BSED students) to determine their awareness of and interest in incorporating Mansaka Tura into ELT, then implemented the resulting course pack with 37 first-year Bachelor of Secondary Education (BSED) English students within the GED 2 - Purposive Communication course. Results showed that although awareness of Mansaka Tura remained relatively low (M = 3.06, SD = 0.51), stakeholders expressed high interest in (M = 4.10) and strongly positive perceptions of (M = 4.46) its inclusion in ELT curricula. Following implementation, students demonstrated statistically significant gains across all four macro-language skills—reading, writing, listening, and speaking—from pre-test to post-test (t = 15.44, df = 36, p < .001; Z = -5.31, p < .001), and rated the course pack as “Very Satisfied” across all five evaluated dimensions. These findings indicate that contextualizing indigenous literature within ELT curricula can simultaneously strengthen students’ language proficiency and safeguard endangered indigenous knowledge, underscoring the broader imperative to decolonize tertiary ELT curricula in institutions situated within or near Indigenous communities.