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The Department of Education on Wednesday announced that the training
of 2,168 high school teachers on the use of lesson guides in
teaching English had been completed. This is part of the massive
effort to improve Philippine government schools’ use of English as
the medium of instruction. Secretary Jesli Lapus explained that
these Master Teachers and Senior Teachers went through the program
which is just one of DepEd’s many projects to improving the
teaching of English in our public schools.
We welcome the addition of 2,168 expert teachers
of English in our public schools.
Experts in teaching English, who must be fluent
users of grammatically correct and idiomatic English, in writing and
in speech, are vital to the success of the effort to restore general
mastery of English in this country.
But there is something else to be decided:
should English be used as the primary medium of instruction in
teaching English to Filipinos or should the primary medium be the
mother tongue of the pupil with English as the second language? And
shouldn’t English be taught—as a second language—as early as
the nursery and kindergarten years in the public schools?
Executive Order 210
These must be asked because Presidential
Executive Order 210 (issued in 2003) has made English the primary
medium of instruction.
Worried about the decline of English, Math and
Science proficiency among Filipinos, President Gloria Macapagal
Arroyo issued EO 210 to strengthen the use of the English language
as a medium of instruction in the Philippine educational system. It
acknowledges that under the 1987 Constitution, for purposes of
communication and instruction, the official languages of the
Philippines are Filipino and English.
Since it is state policy “to promote education
as a means to achieve and maintain an accelerating rate of economic
development and social progress,” the Executive Order makes note
that there is a “need to develop the aptitude, competence and
proficiency of our students in the English language to maintain and
improve their competitive edge in emerging and fast-growing local
and international industries, particularly in the area of
Information and Communications Technology [ICT].”
EO 210 also notes that “strengthening the use
of the English language as a medium of instruction also depends on
the improvement of the entire educational system, particularly in
the training of educators and the provision of learning materials
and resources.” And it cites the full support of the DepEd, the
Commission on Higher Education [CHED] and the Technical Education
and Skills Development Authority [TESDA] for the policies being
established by EO 210.
These policies are to teach English as a second
language, starting in the First Grade.
As provided for in the 2002 Basic Education
Curriculum, English shall be used as the medium of instruction for
English, Mathematics and Science from at least the Third Grade
level.
“The English language shall be used as the
primary medium of instruction in all public and private institutions
of learning in the secondary level, including those established as
laboratory and/or experimental schools, and non-formal and
vocational or technical educational institutions. As the primary
medium of instruction, the percentage of time allotment for learning
areas conducted in the English language is expected to be not less
than seventy percent (70 percent) of the total time allotment for
all learning areas in the secondary level.”
EO 210 also establishes the policy of extensive
teacher training.
Enrichment of Filipino
About the use of Filipino, EO 210 provides that
“Pursuant to the Constitutionally-mandated policy of the
Government to ensure and promote the evolution, development and
further enrichment of Filipino as the national language of the
Philippines, the Filipino language/shall continue to be the medium
of instruction in the learning areas of Filipino and Araling
Panlipunan.”
Secretary Lapus and education authorities must
seriously consider the formidable body of expert opinion—supported
by findings from well-conceived and rigorously-monitored experiments
of many countries—that it is beyond doubt that using the mother
tongue of pupils achieves far greater results than using another
tongue.
The use of the mother tongue as the medium of
instruction is of such import that it is among the key reforms in
the Omnibus Education Reform Act introduced by Sen. Mar Roxas.
What Deped has been doing so far, following
President Arroyo’s instructions, has yielded beneficial results,
with schools handled by re-trained teachers markedly faring better
in English, Math and Science in the 2007 national exams than they
did in 2006.
The Kalinga experience
They will surely register higher results if the
students’ mother tongues were used as the primary medium in
teaching them English, Science, Math and any other subject. Proof of
this is found in the now famous experience of Lubuagan District, in
Kalinga province, where pupils improved by as much as 300 percent.
Similar experiences were monitored in India. And throughout Western
Europe, Dutchmen, Germans, Portuguese, Scandinavians are nowadays
speaking their fluent and correct form of idiomatic American or
British English. They are taught English in their native languages
together with English—by master teachers.
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