Philippines needs new curriculum to improve math, science education

MANILA, March 17, 2011—Why has science and mathematics education in the Philippines deteriorated?

According to a University of the Philippines (UP) expert, this is because local education persisted in using an obsolete discipline-based curriculum in math and science (which is mostly by rote and without much inquiry and high level of thinking) already rejected as early as 1993 by the UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization).

Dr. Merle Tan, UP NISMED (National Institute for Science and Mathematics Education Development) director, said the present math and science curriculum has produced questionable results in the performance of students in the yearly achievement tests which are below those in other countries.

Also, Tan said, the present curriculum does not consider the high drop-out rate in local education and is not responsive to the needs of students who might leave school at a particular grade level.

“There seems to be a serious gap between science and mathematics education as it is practiced and the science and math education knowledge and skills needed for day-to-day living,” she said, citing a 2007 UP NISMED study as basis for her observation.

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Rediscovering English
By Robbie Pangilinan, Manila Standard Today

The Philippines was once considered the third largest English-speaking country in the world.

However, a recent US state department report in 2007 revealed that English language proficiency is declining in the country so we need to “restore the comparative advantages it once enjoyed to attract more investors and to support higher growth.”

Diliman Preparatory School (DPS), one of the country’s leading learning institutions today, knows and understands this too well. English is the primary language of focus in DPS and the school wants to achieve an international standard level of proficiency in the English language in the future.

Former Senator Nikki Coseteng, DPS president, says that being proficient in a language in school, at work and even among social relations and events have advantages. She adds that most educational materials are written in English and proficiency in English gives students a big advantage in research, comprehension and expressing oneself.

“We must make sure that our children are competitively proficient,” says Raymond Ang, president of the Edulynx English Proficiency Intervention Program (ePIP).

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Penman: Going global
By Butch Dalisay, The Philippine Star 

February 28, 2011—Speaking of going global, I had a fun chat over lunch recently with two ladies, both “Penman readers,” who happen to be running one of the most vital services connecting Filipinos to the rest of the world. I don’t mean another Internet operation, although some aspects of it can be accessed online; rather, I’m talking about standardized English examinations, specifically the Test of English for International Communication or TOEIC (pronounced the way you would say “stoic”).

I’ve always been curious about these exams, having taken a couple of them myself—the more widely known Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), which happens to be TOEIC’s chief competitor, and the Graduate Record Examination (GRE), which were required for my graduate studies in the US. (Indeed, so eager was I to study in the US 25 years ago that I took both exams on my own account, and brought the exam results with me to my Fulbright interview; I guess the strategy worked.)

So when I learned from Bambina—the wife of Cesar Buenaventura, the business icon whose yet-unpublished family biography I wrote—that her company, Hopkins International Partners, was the Philippine representative of TOEIC, I asked her to take me behind the scenes and to tell me a bit more about this test and what exactly it does. Bambina obliged and brought her partner along, Hopkins president Corina Unson.

As it turns out, the TOEIC, the TOEFL, and the GRE, among other tests, are all products of the New Jersey-based Educational Testing Service or ETS…

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Back to the future: 25 years
By Averill Pizarro, Manila Bulletin

MANILA, February 23, 2011—Not too long ago, Jose Dalisay, Jr. (Butch, to many readers) wrote a book about life in the Philippines under Marcos. It won the 1993 National Book Award for fiction and the Palanca grand prize for the novel, among others.

The book, entitled Killing Time in a Warm Place, is currently in print (and let me take this time to urge you to grab a copy, it’s less than 200 bucks, and who better to appreciate the best of Philippine literature than the Filipino?). This new edition opens with a poignant introductory essay on what it was like to be imprisoned under Martial Law back in ’73.

I have always had a close affinity for stories of those years, perhaps because I grew up with parents who talk about it with such relish. And they weren’t even in the center of the movement—they were mostly spectators, young and wide-eyed, watching their nation and their people evolve. They went from a life of fear, to learning to believe that they could do something, and today…

Dr. Dalisay ends his introduction with an interesting line: “…astonished, no doubt, by the extent to which a life could be complicated further.” It’s a line that has affected me profoundly in the way I think about my country and its history—but you’d have to read the book to understand what I mean.

When I entered UP, I studied under several people who were actually there—people who were jailed or shot or imprisoned, who had lost fathers and brothers in the epic struggle that came to a head on February 25, 1986…

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BTW, English, the gnarliest language of all, is a survivor
By Doug Cabral, Martha’s Vineyard Times

March 23, 2011—Lots of times, the kids' text messages contain letter combinations that mean nothing to me. I've learned some of the basics of this coded communication, but much of it is beyond the beyond, as an interior decorator friend would say.

For instance, I now know "lol" means "laugh out loud," although at first I thought it was short for lollygag, which means aimless dithering. It's a terrific word — from time to time, I suspect the kids of it — so I was disappointed that the children had foreshortened it so clumsily that it was no longer fun to see or say. Live and learn.

I find myself exposed to more and more of this moronic code — forgive me, it slipped out — in the comment posts to articles on mvtimes.com, so I consulted Rick Mello, the expert Timesian in all things techno. He shook his hoodied head indulgently and referred me to the Urban Dictionary, which naturally lives online.

Urban Dictionary describes itself as "the dictionary you wrote. Define your world, 5,688,030 definitions since 1999."

I'm sure that the "you" they refer to is not me and that whoever it is, he or she or they are a lot younger. Of course, the Urban Dictionary is more than a dictionary. You can buy tee-shirts. The legend on one popular one is "Anything unrelated to elephants is irrelephant." Get it?

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The right word
By Sidney Berger, PhD, TheSimmonsVoice.com

March 17, 2011—There is a story about a foreigner whose second language was English. He had a huge English vocabulary and was mighty proud of it. But though he knew the words, he didn't always know their precise meaning.

His friend asked him, "Do you and your wife have children?" He thought for a moment and then said, with gusto in his knowledge of many fine English words, "No, we do not have any children. My wife is impregnable." He thought a moment, and added, "She is impossible." He sensed that his friend wasn't quite getting the point. So he said, "She is unassailable." He got another blank stare. "She is unscalable." More blank looks. Then he thought he had the right word: "She is unbearable."

His friend smiled but again showed that he didn't understand. So he plumbed his word hoard some more and came up with, "She is inscrutable." Another blank smile from the friend. He took another stab at it: "She is inconceivable." No understanding response from the friend. He tried his last brilliant word, figuring he really had it this time: "She is insurmountable." Then he gave up.

Here were some pretty fine English words, but not one of them conveyed what he really wanted to say, that his wife could not conceive.

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Offenders nuked by English language
By Miranda Devine, Herald Sun

March 17, 2011—One local side-effect of Japan's current troubles is the constant mispronunciation of the word "nuclear" by some.

People who really should know better have been on the airwaves pronouncing it "nyooc-yular".

This is an affront to the English language rivaled only, in my opinion, by pronouncing the word "infrastructure" as "infa-structure".

If there were just a few people saying "nyooc-yular" you could dismiss it as a fringe oddity. But it is an epidemic, assaulting our ears every day.

Is it rampant illiteracy or widespread dyslexia? You wonder if people have tin ears or just don't care. You hear it from leading business people, scientific experts, politicians and journalists.

Even well-spoken Neil Mitchell was heard uttering the mangled form this week. Why, you wonder, does someone not pull him aside and whisper gently: "It's nyoo-clee-ah."

Some blame George W. Bush, the former US president, for sanctioning the gruesome mispronunciation. He used to mangle the word with relish.

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Watch your language
By William Wright, Cleveland Banner

March 4, 2011—It might surprise you to know that English is not the most widely spoken language in the world or that more people speak Spanish worldwide than English.

Currently, the five leading languages are Chinese, Spanish, English, Hindi and Arabic. I was even more shocked to learn there were 7,358 languages spoken worldwide in 2009, according to Ethnologue.com.

Linguists estimate 90 percent of these languages are spoken by fewer than 100,000 people, but that is still a lot of languages uttered around our planet! Of course, this was not always the case.

According to Genesis 11:1, there was a time when everyone on earth spoke only one language. It makes sense if human life started with one man and one woman that there was only one language in the beginning.

But Genesis 11:4-8 tells us God confused the language of humans who set out to build a city and tower to make a name for themselves, causing them to scatter and fulfill His purpose to fill the earth.

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To cut a long story short, brevity is best
By Robert McCrum, The Observer

March 20, 2011—The average English word has just five letters. Words in the Inuit language, by contrast, have 14. "Short", a good old word, which expresses something vital about our language, also reflects a global appetite. In the age of brevity, English has become a default medium: functional, fashionable and well suited to the witty reductions of the keypad.

"Gr8", "u" and "lol" are now universal. It's said that even the French prefer "now" to "maintenant", while the Dutch write "2m" for "tomorrow". Traditionalists will scorn this text rendering of Hamlet's most famous line (2b? Ntb? = ?) but it reflects the zeitgeist. Sticklers for correct English like to strike an Anglo-Saxon attitude and deplore the consequences of the English language becoming the world's language. It is, they'll say, as if a three-rosette restaurant had been taken over by McDonald's.

There's not a lot they can do about it. Global English, whose ambitions are to make international connections and get its message across, shows every sign of morphing into what Hemingway once called "Babel's style"…

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Is the Internet Americanising (or Americanizing) British English?
By Daniel Hannan, The Telegraph UK

March 13, 2011—Divided by a common language? Not for much longer...

The Internet – much to the consternation of Euro-integrationists – is drawing the English-speaking peoples into a common conversation. And a good thing, too: it was always fatuous to pretend that geographical proximity was more important than history or sentiment, blood or speech. Where the EU is united by government decree, the Anglosphere is united by organic ties, by language and law, by shared habits of thought.

Here, though, is a question, posed to mark the centenary of the Commonwealth. Is the common online dialogue also leading to a more direct harmonization of the English language? This blog, in a typical week, attracts 80,000 readers from the UK, 30,000 from the US, and 10,000 from elsewhere, mainly from other Anglosphere nations: a proportion that is fairly representative of British websites. In consequence, British bloggers and readers are far more familiar with the American Weltanschauung. But are we also starting to write like Americans? Is the combination of the Internet and US-designed spell-check programmes (or programs) hastening the Americanization of British English?

We all have our personal bêtes noires…

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Readers’ choices of foreign language versions of popular songs
By Jon Dennis, Guardian.co.uk

March 10, 2011—I don't buy the canard that one language is any more or less suited to singing pop music than another. But artists and listeners carry assumptions and prejudices about what singing in a certain language signifies: singing in French sounds romantic, German industrial, Italian operatic, and so on.

There were often sound commercial reasons for these tracks' existence. English hasn't always been the lingua franca of popular culture, and record companies often asked artists to record in foreign languages to quash rival non-English cover versions. Even so, information is scant about the motives behind many foreign language versions. They're rarely central to an artist's career, and are usually neglected by biographers seeking the bigger picture.

So what we have here is curiosity value. You don't have to understand the lingo to appreciate them: there's a real pleasure in hearing a familiar record sounding unfamiliar. It's like hearing them for the first time. Johnny Cash singing “Ring of Fire” in Spanish? This discovery alone justifies this week's theme. Admittedly, el hombre de negro sounds a tad awkward singing in Spanish, but the mariachi trumpets of “Ring of Fire” help him get away with it.

Kraftwerk naturally recorded many tracks in their native German, but hearing “Showroom Dummies” in French is a disorientating surprise. The first of several Ralf 'n' Florian songs sung in French, it sounds stranger and more otherworldly than ever. It's a celebration of Europe, a theme of the song's parent album “Trans-Europe Express.”

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English assaults on language bastions
By VR Narayanaswami, LiveMint.com

March 21, 2011—B for Bombay! How often we have used this jingle, to help someone spell a word. That had to stop after the people of the city decided that its name should be restored to the pristine “Mumbai,” in place of its anglicized form. We should switch to M for Mumbai perhaps.

There is a close parallel to this from Russia. The government of Georgia wrote to Japan protesting against the latter’s use of the word Gurujiya as the name of the republic. This is the Russian name for the region, adapted in Japanese. Georgia’s foreign minister demanded that the name should be written Joujia, free from any Russian taint.

After the break-up of the Soviet Union, Russia was thrown open to Western culture, and this led to the adoption of many foreign words. On the streets you could see “djeeps” and “djeans”; entrepreneurs called themselves “biznesmen” and discussed “menedgment”. In 2003, a new Bill was passed to protect the language. In this order, English words were put together with slang and swear words. Anyone caught using these was to face punishment at a correction centre.

Three months ago, China launched a campaign to contain the spread of English. On 22 December, the General Administration of Press and Publication imposed a ban on the use of English words by the media and publishing houses…

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Interview: “Time to rediscover India”
By Anasuya Basu, The Telegraph-India

March 6, 2011—The newly appointed British Council director, Robert Lynes, who was in the city recently, spoke to Metro about the council’s plans for the country, India-UK relationship in the 21st century and more

How has your stay in India been so far?

I have been in India for just over a month and I am already in the midst of exciting things. I came here at the beginning of the third edition of the India Art Summit that provided me with an insight into the vibrant art scene here.

Immediately after that was the Jaipur Literature Festival that I attended. The British Council had a tent there that served as a reading room. People would come there and relax, read a book, join the British Council Library online.

We were delighted to launch Patrick French’s new book India: A Portrait. We also had Ian Jack over. There have been many exciting events in the past weeks.

What kind of cultural exchange will India and the UK have in the coming years?

Art is an area that the British Council is keen to develop and build on working with partners in India…

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Chinese Gurucool Of Joy
By Prithvijit Mitra and Jhimli Mukherjee Pandey, Times of India

KOLKATA, March 3, 2011—The city has always been on the roadmap of educationists and knowledge seekers from across the Himalayas. While in ancient times, the Chinese crossed Bengal to reach Nalanda University to study Buddhism and Pali, and, in the more recent times, they arrived at Visva-Bharati to study art and Sino-Indian relationships, this time it is different.

The Chinese students trickling into the city are opting for conventional streams, English, BCom, computer science, management. The Chinese education ministry's experiment in this academic session has yielded promising results. Started with just 30 students this session, the percentage is likely to see at least three times increase next year. Also, while these students can be found only at St Xavier's College, negotiations are on to open up other campuses to them.

For years, the Chinese education ministry through a quasi-government Beijing-based agency was conducting a recce of leading campuses. While others were hesitant, citing the English proficiency of these students, St Xavier's College decided to take a chance.

"Till five years ago, we used to get Thai, Nepali, Bhutanese and Bangladeshi students, but not Chinese. Earlier, cities like Pune and Hyderabad were their choice as they preferred IT courses. But this time, it was different," said St Xavier's College principal father Felix Raj.

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“Siege mentality” over the English language
By Collin Abraham, Malaysiakini.com

March 18, 2011—There has been widespread condemnation, literally across the board, on the opposition towards the growing demand for the greater use and development of the English language in our public universities and centres of higher learning.

But with respect, most of the issues raised are not new, resulting in a failure to grasp the 'dangerous' negative social impact assessment on questions of ethnic/racial integration and national unity.

Basically, it can be argued, that a significant section of the elite power groups appear to be challenging calls to raise the status of English, claiming it to be a threat to the Malay 'special position' within the same context as the theoretical framework of the 'sieze' mentality they are expressing towards the possible withdrawal of other Malay social privileges that I have enunciated in earlier postings.

By stifling the institutional access towards the mastery of English, the Malays, as correctly pointed out by a former minister of information, run the risk of becoming "second class" citizens.

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English holds the key to achieving Vision 2020
G. Jeyarahman, TheStar.com.my

March 21, 2011—As a former teacher, headmaster, assistant supervisor of primary schools in Selangor, lecturer of English at Universiti Teknologi Mara (preparing students going to Australia on JPA scholarships) and having been in the field of education (1955-2003), I feel I have something to say regarding the importance of English.

I remember when I was the headmaster of SRK Sungei Besar near Sabak Bernam in 1966, a Malay parent came to register his child in the school .

I asked him to register his child in the school nearest to his home and he asked why I couldn’t admit his child in my school which was English medium then.

He seemed rather annoyed and remarked that if ministers could send their children to English schools, why couldn’t he? I had no answer.

I am astonished that academics and students from universities who should be open-minded and models of progress, examples for ordinary folk to follow, are adopting retrogressive attitudes and behaviour in opposing the use of English.

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Knowing one language not enough in this age
By Tan Sri Lee Lam Thye, TheStar.my.com
 
March 17, 2011—Every rational-minded and forward-looking Malaysian undoubtedly shares Wong Chun Wai’s views in “On The Beat” that universities have to give importance to English if they want to produce employable graduates.

Many Malaysians fail to see the logic of the protest by students at the Academy of Malay studies (AMS), Universiti Malaya, over the Higher Education Ministry’s call for universities to give importance to English to enhance the graduates’ employment prospects.

It just does not make sense for any student to create an issue out of a need to improve students’ skills in English to increase the graduate employability rate.

It is a known fact that the problem of poor or weak command of English has affected all faculties in all our public universities. The problem is not only confined to Malay students but also Chinese and Indians and other ethnic groups from Sabah and Sarawak.

The teaching, learning and use of the English language must not be made into an issue when it is done in the interest of our future generation and for the sake of our nation’s progress and its future well-being.

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Expressive sentences
By Keith W. Wright, The Star.com.my

March 6, 2011—Written and verbal communication can be improved by understanding and using colloquial and idiomatic terms.

Over the last few weeks, eight techniques of the 4S-Accelerated English Program’s Art of the Alternative have been highlighted to help learners quickly and significantly improve their speaking and writing skills. In this final instalment of the series, encouragement is given to those for whom English is an additional language (EAL) to set about learning, copying and using common colloquial and idiomatic terms.

The objective behind this recommendation is not just to make an EAL person sound “more native”, but also so that they can be better equipped to understand some of the things primary English speakers say in everyday conversations and written communications.

(ix) Using appropriate colloquial and idiomatic terminology.

Developing the ability to use colloquial and idiomatic terminology can add colour and variety to one’s communication, be it written or oral – providing the technique is not over-done or abused, and the terms applied are not crude.

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What sort of English…
By Manel Atapattu, The Sunday Leader.lk

With the attainment of independence in Sri Lanka in 1948, it was naturally felt that the study of a national language should be given preference. It was also realised that the study of English ought not to be done away with, with the study of the official language. Today the English language has to be studied as a second language in Sri Lanka.

English today has become an international language widely spoken throughout the world and its importance in the life of every educated individual is being felt every day. Recruits to the country’s administrative and diplomatic circles will need to have a high standard of English education. In order to keep diplomatic, commercial, cultural and intellectual contacts with the West, we need an English education. English is vital in order to be employed in the private sector.

Books dealing with important subjects like scientific knowledge, engineering, medicine etc. exist in the English language. It is generally admitted that English possesses some of the richest literature in the world. Books written by William Shakespeare, who was born in 1564, are being used even in 2011 in international and private schools in Sri Lanka and the world over.

However, the question that arises today is what sort of English is to be put to use in education…

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A night under Prof. Atukwei Okai’s baobab tree
By Ernest Dela Aglanu, MyJoyOnline.com/Gha

March 18, 2011—His antiquity is enormous—a master class perfectionist who dwells in the English language and its chemistry. Prof Atukwei Okai is no stranger to fluency—a world-class English literature physician.

“He is one of God's greatest gifts to this generation,” Albert Ocran, CEO of Combert Impressions defines him.

He was the guest on Personality Profile on Drive Time on Joy 99.7 FM with Kwabena Anokye Adisi - Bola Ray Thursday and it was a night filled with poetry and knowledge.

Oh what a night it was: Unwind me Joy; Unwind me 99.7; Unwind me Super Hits Radio. - with a huge claim that, “we were rapping before rap came,” he jovially proclaimed.

Whiles he poured out his countless experiences and fond memories growing up, it was evident this selfless personality still has a strong belief in Ghana and Africa—a key part of his life’s mission.

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China makes unprecedented English-language push
By Greg Andrews, Indianapolis Business Journal

HANGZHOU, March 14, 2011—Here’s something to ponder. It’s conceivable that by 2025 the number of English-speaking Chinese will exceed the number of people speaking English as a first language in the rest of the world.

Skeptics abound this will happen. But what’s undeniable is that China has made educating its population in English a big priority—and when this Communist government decides something is important, it goes all out.

Reminders of the importance China places on English are easy to find. As members of the Indiana University delegation I’m traveling with picked up our bags at Shanghai’s Pudong International Airport on Saturday and boarded a bus for the three-hour drive to Hangzhou, signs the whole way were in both Chinese and English.

China Daily reports that more than 300 million Chinese already are studying English—nearly one quarter of the country’s population. And in the next five years, all schools will begin teaching English in kindergarten, and all state employees younger than 40 will be required to master at least 1,000 English phrases.

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Watch your language
By Daniela Piteo, Thorold News Niagara

The English language is rife with descriptive words, yet we seem to rely heavily on one word to express a vast array of emotions, situations and outcomes.

The word is so infamous, it is the only one that can be referred to with one letter alone.

When it is uttered, it is referred to as dropping an f-bomb.

It is explosive, powerful and definitely not appropriate in some situations.

On a recent televised award show, an actress was given a prestigious honour and in her flustered exuberance, she dropped an f-bomb. It was neither the time nor the place.

There are roughly, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, 170,000 words in the English language, yet one word alone that shouldn't be used in certain domains, finds its way into out dialogue.

During a recent trip to Thorold Secondary School, the f-word was being dropped almost ad nauseam. Yet, the teachers roaming the hallways didn't blink.

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It's spellbinding to watch young brainiacs at work
By Paula Simons, Edmonton Journal

February 19, 2011—Chauffeur. Significance. Maintenance.

These aren't difficult words. I type them all the time. But every time -including this time -I have to stop to think.

Embarrassing.

There's another word that always trips me up. Two Rs? One R?

Embarrassing? I'll say it is.

I'm a professional writer. Not only do I have a master's degree in journalism, I have an honours degree in English, for heaven's sake.

Spelling has never come easily to me. Grammar largely seems intuitive. (Grammer? Grammar?) But after all these years of reading and writing, the orthography of the English language often defeats me.

It's such a ridiculous Velcro language, composed out of discarded bits of ancient Greek and Latin, Anglo-Friesian, West Saxon, Celtic and medieval French, spiced with borrowings of Hindi, Yiddish, Cree, Malay, Afrikaans, Hawaiian, not to mention German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Ukrainian and Japanese.

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Indirectly speaking: A music-lover's guide to... curriculum development
By Mike Guest, The Daily Yomiuri

February 28, 2011—Have you ever been disappointed by "greatest hits" or "best of" albums? You know, those cash cows that record companies (remember them?) foist upon the public because they require no new compositions or recordings from the artist? For me somehow they always came up lacking. There was often little flow, as the tracks originally came from separate albums and often muted any thematic or dynamic buildup that the band was originally trying to achieve.

This trend has recently been exacerbated by the iPod, with its ability to shuffle tracks, turning what were once cohesive artistic statements, where each track was placed carefully for the sake of developing a holistic dynamic, the whole concept of an "album," into a series of disjointed sound bites. Tracks were never meant be randomly slotted in. If they were, what would be the point of them being placed together on an album?

A poorly developed English course curriculum can have the same effect on language learners. When a course is treated primarily as a bunch of discrete, self-contained lessons, even if they are individually "good" lessons--the teacher's greatest hits--and nothing more, little will be retained by students. The idea of an English course should contain a sense of cohesion and unity, a process and development carefully thought out so that each individual unit contributes to the sense of the whole…

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Learning Turkish: Steps to gaining fluency in the language
By Brooks Emerson, Today’s Zaman                                                                   

February 28, 2011—I’ve been living in İstanbul for almost nine years. While I have a noticeable accent, I have managed to gain fluency in the language. Here are some suggestions supported by current research that I hope will be helpful as you continue on your adventure of learning Turkish.

1. Find a phrase book for Turks who wish to travel to an English-speaking country. It will cost from TL 15-20 and has advantages and disadvantages.

A. Advantages

* There are many useful sentences you can memorize in their entirety to communicate your needs.

* You can pick and choose what you want to learn and then go immediately out into the world and use it. For example you might learn, “Pardon, saat kaç acaba?” (Excuse me, but do you have the time?), then you can walk down İstiklal Caddesi (or any crowded street) and ask that question again and again to everybody you see with a watch. Even if you don’t understand the answer, you will become more and more fluent every time you ask.

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