Improve Your English, Dude!

It is ironic that this month of Linggo ng Wika (National Language Week) we read a story that  spells out the need of improving our English capability. Although it is one of our national languages, there is no such thing as “English Week” that promotes the use of English unlike its Tagalog counterpart in the months of August. Obviously, nationalistic sentiments dramatically favor Filipino from English unlike in Canada where English and French are co-equal. Sometimes, our misguided sense of nationalism leads us to reap the unsavory fruits of our follies.

The news simply says that the better your English is, the more opportunities you have in the Philippines as well.

We see the idiocy of the government in encouraging if not imposing Filipino as the medium of instruction in the universities. My friend and college contemporary, now a professor in Ilocos Norte says that he is tri-lingual (English, Tagalog and Ilocano) in delivering lectures stressing that if in English alone, his students cannot follow or worse, cannot understand the lecture.

Whether we acknowledge or not; believe or not, our English has dramatically deteriorated. A number of Filipino college graduates or professionals working in English-speaking countries like the US have some difficulties at times expressing themselves. Differences in accent, sentence construction, colloquialism and pronunciation understandably vary but the problem lies in expressing what is meant because of halting knowledge of the language.

Did anyone come across news stories in the past about text books peppered with grammatical and factual errors? For sure, those were written by Ph.D or M.A. holders.

That means that some professors too have undependable skills in English.   How did they obtain their doctoral and masteral degrees and hoe competent are they in discharging their duties?

Exacerbating the issue is the common use of “jejemon”. It hints that is all right to write something un-grammatical or misspelled even to the point of incoherence. The government cannot ban its use in personal needs but it can restrict its popularity by making it clear that it is not acceptable in schools at all levels and in public.

If our English capability continues to deteriorate, time will come when we send our students to traditionally non-English speaking countries like China, Japan, Korea and even Vietnman to learn English. By that time we realize that some of them came here to learn English from our schools. -30-