EDUCATION AND TEACHING FORUM

Discusssions shift focus to the virtues and perils of using Taglish

After a long hiatus, our special Education and Teaching Forum is showing signs of life again, but if has shifted focus to the virtues and perils of using Taglish. The discussion on Taglish was sparked by the observation of new Forum member raninxs that Taglish isn’t so bad. “Language is supposed to be about understanding each other, and if we understand each other better through Taglish, then I don’t find anything wrong with it,” raninxs says.

Raninxs found a kindred spirit in Forum member maudionisio, who favors the emergence of Taglish as the country’s linga franca. He postulates that English is actually akin to English in having adopted words from so many languages, like “déjà vu” for the French phrase that means “you have seen it”; “admiral” from the Arabic “amir al bahr,” which means “commander of the sea”; and “assassinate” from the Arabic “hashshasin,” which means “one who smokes hashish.” “The difference is that when we adopt English words into Tagalog, we still consider these words as foreign and refer to them as Taglish,” maudionisio says.

Forum members Sky and Shaoley joined the discussions at this point. Sky says it won’t be easy to ask Filipinos to stop using Taglish; “this will only happen when we start doing so ourselves,” she says. On the other hand, Shaoley says that although there are those who oppose Taglish, its regular usage will convince people that it’s not really that intricate, so she thinks that they will eventually embrace it and use it in their everyday life.

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Below are the postings previously being discussed in the Forum. You are most welcome to respond to any of the postings made so far or to post an entirely new topic of your own. Do share with us your thoughts on how honest-to-goodness education and teaching reforms might be achieved in our country.

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—Tonybau, a medical doctor and former PTA president, paints a bleak scenario of overcrowding, teacher overload and lack of qualified teachers, lack of basic facilities like clean water and libraries, and malnutrition among pupils in his city’s public high school. He then advocates a total overhaul of the educational system that “continues to churn out students, majority of [whom] are products of an environment where teachers are there only to earn their keep.”

—Florlaca, a retired university professor and department head with a master’s in zoology and a doctorate in comparative endocrinology, vigorously proposes that improving research performance is essential to real academic reform. He says that publications that meet internationally accepted criteria are the best indicator of research performance and of competence to do other academic work as well. We still have to hear a response to this from academe or from education officials.

—Arvin Ortiz, a student-writer, points out that while some professors consider Wikipedia as an unreliable source for students’ research papers and theses, some PhDs in the Philippines have actually cited Wikipedia as a source for the textbooks they have written. What gives?

—Penmanila, creative writing institute director and English professor at the University of the Philippines, notes that teachers of English in the Philippines have such a weak command of the English language themselves, and wonders how their English can be improved. He asks: Do seminars and things of that sort really help?

—Madgirl109, who describes herself as “just another struggling Filipino worker in Japan,” gives a first-hand view of the problems and opportunities of Filipinos working in Japan. For them to improve their job and income prospects in Japan, she says, they need to become more proficient not only in English but in Nihongo as well.

—Meikah, who used to be a university instructor but now works as a web education professional, believes that education and teaching in the country have gotten from bad to worse. She says college students lack comprehension skills because their teachers in grade school and high school had made no effort at all to help them understand or teach them how to understand their lessons.

—Maudionisio says that to foist the myth of “one nation, one language,” the Philippine government massively brainwashed elementary pupils in the 1960s to think that the national language was Pilipino, and that the other languages spoken by Filipinos in the other regions were simply dialects. He contends that this brainwashing has not been undone, so some of those pupils—now grown up—still erroneously refer to the various Philippine languages as “dialects.”

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