New Englishes
FILIPINOS have long learned to read, speak and write En-glish. Call it what you will, "American English, Philippine style" or "Philippine English" or whatever, it is still English language. And it is one of many new Englishes spoken and written in many countries of the world, from the Philippines to Singapore and Malaysia, from India, Ceylon to Pakistan, from North America, Australia, New Zealand, to South Africa.Unlike Filipinos who learned American English, in those other countries the peoples there learned English from the British. And today, as I wrote in this column last Thursday, English is being learned by millions and millions of young students in China, South Korea, Vietnam, Japan, Germany, Austria and Greece. In these nations, with strong national identities, they are aggressively promoting bilingualism. And their citizens, young and old alike, are remarkably becoming proficient in English.
And here in the Philippines, our people have learned English long, long ago. As a matter of fact there was a time when English and Filipino were considered both as official languages, until some language nationalists succeeded in making Filipino as the national language in the 1987 Constitution.
And, very recently, a group of educators, savants, writers and two National Artists in Literature went to the Supreme Court to stop a Department of Education order implementing a presidential directive mandating that English be used as the medium of instruction for math and science in public schools, beginning with the third grade and for all subjects in secondary schools.
This is strange, indeed. They are prominent persons who are what they are today because they read, speak and write in English! And they want to deprive our young students of learning a second language? They don’t want our youth to acquire English skills which would surely be useful to and help them compete in a globalize world where English is growing rapidly as an international language.
Instead, they insisted that Filipino and the regional languages should be used as the primary media of instruction. They said that the government’s failure to do it has, "led to serious difficulties in learning among elementary and high school students, such as ineffective communication in the classrooms, low academic achievement and a high dropout rate."
They continued, "the harmful effects of using a foreign language for learning are not just limited to low academic achievement and cognitive growth, it impairs the emotional security and sense of self-worth and the ability to participate meaningfully in the educational process by lower class children who develop an inferiority complex as they are stigmatized by their use of the native tongue."
Furthermore, they added, "the use of Filipino would enable them to learn to read and write since it is easy for them to understand… This change will make students stay in school longer, learn better, quicker and more permanently, and will in fact be a bridge to more effective learning in English and Filipino."
These are quotations from their petition filed with the Supreme Court. If you, the ordinary citizens, have become breathless or moved to mirth or irritation by just reading their long-winded, boring, unbearable, run-on and hard to read sentences, and getting lost in the thick verbiage, what more of the fifteen magistrates of the land?
Wouldn’t those learned justices, who write their decisions well, vividly, and wisely in plain English that every one can understand, throw that petition (of those savants, linguists and writers), which smacks of pedantry, into the garbage heap?
Already, according to the Social Weather Stations, our national proficiency in English has declined by 10% over the last 30 years. And, sad to say, we are being left behind, particularly by China where some 175 million people are now studying English, in the global march to English proficiency.
Indeed, English has become the lingua franca of the world.
