ENGLISH could soon become the principal medium of instruction in all schools in the Philippines, The Philippine Star reported on May 30.
The House of Representatives committee on education has endorsed a bill, Bill 2894. It was mainly authored by Representative Eduardo Gullas, from Cebu (a seaport on the island of Cebus), and calls for changing the present bilingual policy in schools. It would require that English be the principal medium of instruction, from grade school to the tertiary level. The only exception would be when Filipino is taught as a subject.
English would also be promoted as the medium of interaction among pupils and students.
Gullas said that Filipino President Arroyo had also agreed to support the move.
He said that there was a need for English as the principal medium of instruction. That’s because the Philippines are losing their competitive edge in English proficiency to neighbouring countries like China.
English was the medium of instruction until 1974 when the bilingual policy requiring the use of both English and Filipino was introduced.
“As a result of this policy, the learning of English suffered a setback. One reason was what linguists call language interference. Targeting the learning of two languages (English and Filipino, or Tagalog, a language on which Filipino is based) is too much for Filipinos, especially in lower grades. And if the child happens to be a non-Tagalog speaker, this actually means learning two foreign languages at the same time, an almost impossible task,” Gullas said.
He said the difficulty Filipino students face in learning two languages at the same time could be one of the reasons they lag behind their neighbors in science and maths. He noted that books in these disciplines are written in English.
There was a special debate organised by the Guardian Weekly and Macmillan Education on English-medium education at the 2005 IATEFL conference in April. David Graddol, a leading writer on global trends in English language education warned that there could be wide disparity in the amount of resources that are put into Content and Language Integrated Learning projects. “In many countries they just don’t seem to be equipped to implement CLIL,” he said. “When it works, it works extraordinarily well. But it is actually quite difficult to do well. My feeling is that it may take 30 or 40 years for a country to really pull this one off.”
