Local dialects key to global success
By Philip Tubeza, Philippine Daily Inquirer

MANILA—To be globally competitive, Filipinos must learn first in their local dialect.

City dwellers may cringe upon hearing the accent of people from the provinces, but experts say that one of the keys to a good education is teaching students early on in their mother tongue, or dialect, instead of in English or in Filipino.

Dina S. Ocampo, an education professor at the University of the Philippines, said that numerous international studies had shown that using Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE)—or teaching young students in their dialect—actually improved their ability to learn English, Filipino, and other subjects later on.

“They learn best when the language used for learning is something they used. The analogy here is like a pyramid. You need a strong foundation to learn new things. It’s like you use your old strengths to learn subsequent things,” Ocampo said in an interview.

“To be globally competitive, you must go local. They say that in business. Why can’t we do it in learning? We must start from local.”

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Salute to the premier English Department
By Elmer A. Ordoñez, The Manila Times

The Department of English and Comparative Literature (DECL) of the University of the Philppines is a century old. Yesterday [June 18, 2010] the program of festivities was presented by DECL chair Adelaida F. Lucero for a year-long celebration of 100 years of excellence in teaching, creative writing, research, publication, extension service.

The department was founded in 1910 within the University of the Philippines (then in Padre Faura) which celebrated its centenary two years ago. The first professors were Americans and a few Australians.

Promising students were sent as pensionados to the US like Carlos P. Romulo, first editor of Varsity News (forerunner of the Philippine Collegian), who finished his M.A. in English at Columbia University, with his thesis on the fiction of O. Henry. Romulo’s career spanned from professor of English, to publisher, soldier, diplomat, UP president, and world statesman.

The first Filipino to head the department was Dr. Antonio Viterbo, with a Ph.D. also from Columbia, before the war. In 1928 assistant professors Vicente Hilario and Eliseo Quirino put out the landmark Thinking for Ourselves as an alternative textbook for students steeped in the Victorian English curriculum at the time.

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“Teacher lang”
By Raul Pangalangan, Philippine Daily Inquirer

Once, after the oath-taking of successful bar examinees, I joined a group of law professors from various schools all over the country for the traditional merienda with the Supreme Court justices. One professor recounted that he had just come back from a trip to Japan, and that to his amazement, he got more respect when he was introduced as a law professor rather than as an attorney. It drew oohs and aaahs around the table, with everyone delighted and surprised that the Japanese would bow lower to a sensei rather than to a bengoshi.

Compared to other Asian countries, Filipinos will actually be alone and isolated in their surprise. In Confucian societies especially, the scholar and teacher has a revered place at the top of the societal food chain, right below royalty and certainly high above merchants.

Yet if you’re joining the ranks of Filipino teachers in school year 2010, I tell you now: Brace yourself to hear the words “Teacher lang.” Someone said it to me on my way home after I finished my doctorate at Harvard, someone well-educated and who said it with genuine empathy and concern.

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Stop destroying the English language
By Cheryl Ann Bentley, TimesUnion.com
 
The media bombards us daily with stories of the educational system failing its students, of declining SAT scores, of teachers not setting the bar high enough. We are warned that standards are not being maintained.

One need only look, however, to the media itself to find persuasive examples of the pernicious decline in how we as a society communicate. Recently I heard Donald Trump incorrectly and pompously admonish Cyndi Lauper to say “feel badly,” not “feel bad,” on the Celebrity Apprentice.

Surely NBC has people who should have recognized and edited this arrogant faux pas but chose to leave it as an example of Trump’s status. Money talks even if it is ignorant. I expect that “between you and I” would have also been tolerated.

When reporter Demetra Ganias said in a story on Lyme disease that “...the 16-year-old...was bit by a tick,” rather than bitten. I assume this reporter and her editors are college-educated and review stories before airing them. Surely they learned to hear and use proper verb tense.

This was followed by meteorologist Steve Caporizzo’s follow up “...What is the purpose of a tick? I guess to make us sick...” as though ecosystems could be humorously ignored for more important concepts such as inane banter among the news team.

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60 Embarrassing Ways to Butcher the English Language
By Jackie Tithof Steere, ChicagoNow.com

Just the other day a woman was thrown in jail for her lousy spelling. Attempting to lower the amount of bail for her son, who was charged with receiving stolen property, the woman submitted a bogus letter from her son’s fictitious employer. When officials noticed the company’s name spelled incorrectly, they jailed her for tampering with evidence. And rightly so.

Let’s push aside all the ethical issues here and focus on poor spelling, which I blame on spell check, texting, technology, and the need for speed. In our hurried, communication-addicted society, it's become far more important to get things done quickly rather than done right.

I’m guilty. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve hit the publish button on my blog without thoroughly proofreading, just to get my story in by a certain time. And when commenting on other writer's (60th mistake) writers' blogs, I’ve had to follow up with an oops reply moments later.

I know schools teach spelling. I’ve seen high marks on my kids’ spelling tests, but, honestly, sometimes you'd never know they'd learned a thing.

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Byrd and the Bard
By Stephen Marche, The New York Times
 
Shakespeare scholars, and the literary community generally, have selfish motives for missing Robert Byrd, the West Virginia senator who died last week at 92. Historians will long debate his complicated legacy, but scholars will no doubt agree that he was the greatest Shakespeare-quoter in American political history. His death marks the passing of an entire style of literate politics.

Most politicians quote Shakespeare badly, if at all—with a special emphasis on at all. Quoting Shakespeare is risky as a rhetorical strategy. No American politician today wants to seem too educated. Robert Byrd was different. He didn’t waddle around in clichés like “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” from “Macbeth,” or “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” from “Hamlet.”

In 1994 alone, Senator Byrd quoted every last Shakespeare play on the Senate floor at least once. That’s 37 plays. He could use old favorites as well as the next politician. “Those friends thou hast and their adoption tried, grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel,” Polonius’s old chestnut from “Hamlet,” is how he described his friendship with Bennett Johnston, the Democratic senator from Louisiana. He loved to quote Cleopatra’s “Give me my robe; put on my crown. / I have immortal longings in me.”

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English language learners and the power of personal stories
By Katherine Schulten, The New York Times

We’ve asked Larry Ferlazzo, a prolific blogger and Twitter user who has written a recent book called “English Language Learners: Teaching Strategies That Work,” to do a guest post for us today.

More than five million children in the United States enter school each year speaking a language other than English. That amount is expected to grow to 25% by the year 2025. It’s not surprising, then, that we hear from readers regularly that the more we can offer for this group, the better.

Larry has an interesting background: he spent the first twenty years of his career as a community organizer in California, often working with foreign-born populations. When he became a high school teacher six years ago, he realized that many of the strategies he used as an organizer translated easily to the classroom.

We’ve asked him to detail the ways he’s adapted what he calls the Organizing Cycle to his current students, and he’s provided some very easy and quick lesson ideas (off Times resources, of course) to show how anyone can do it.

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Mind your language
By Namitha A Kumar, DeccanHerald.com

Teaching is a profession that gives great pleasure. To watch young minds grow and evolve and to be a part of their wonder and curiosity is a great experience. However, the worst part of a teacher’s life arrives when one has to mark “fail” on an answer script. It is indeed painful to mark a script where the answers are not up to the mark. I am sure English teachers will agree with me that English answer scripts are getting more and more painful to mark.

Reading the script becomes a challenge because of jumbled, ungrammatical sentences. Spellings are creative, to put it mildly! Sentences with no regard for punctuation give us nightmares. Sometimes, we are forced to look for words that remotely connect with the answer and give marks to the student. Even bright students often suffer as they fail to express themselves properly.

It is perplexing because there is so much emphasis on learning the English language. It is often described as the global language, the means of communication in a new world, the tool to a successful career and so on.  But, in reality, a large number of university students cannot write a grammatically correct, error-free answer to a question.

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Innovate from within
By Lucille Dass, TheStar.com

If innovation is the central issue in economic prosperity, it is equally a cutting-edge issue for all stakeholders in education, given the centrality of education to Malaysia’s growth and development.

According to scientist and education expert J.S. Brown, innovation means “Instead of pouring knowledge into people’s heads, we need to help them grind a new set of eyeglasses so that we (all) can see the world in a new way”.

Innovation transforms a product by giving it a new value, a new lease of life.

Given the current fraught-with-complexities English language scenario in the country, the recently concluded 19th Malaysian English Language Teaching Association (Melta) International Conference 2010 carried an apt theme — “Transformations in English Language Education: Vision, Innovation, Implementation.”

We need “a new set of eyeglasses” to clearly read the signs of the times and to meet current language needs.

Interestingly, the key terms of the theme seem to advocate that language educators undertake a form of action research through a cycle of events, which, combined with reflection, should result in informed and improved practice.

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Confused by a curiosity of collective nouns
By Fred Khumalo, Timeslive.co.za

The beauty of the English language is that no matter how fluent you think you are, it will always humble you. It is so vast and intricate that it would be foolish to claim mastery of this crazy language. You are bound to trip over the many snares or linguistic landmines that lie in wait for you.

My last column is a case in point. I wrote what many readers, my friends, my children, my drinking buddies, my pets and my wife thought was a brilliant column—until one smarty pants reader noted that I had made a grave grammatical error.

In one of my intellectually lazy moments, I erroneously referred to a “swarm of owls.” Wrong collective noun. When the reader alerted me to this faux pas, I felt like Chris Maroleng, that poor e.tv journalist who is now famous for all the wrong reasons—he was the one who told an AWB interviewee not to touch him “on” his studio.

My fingers were too tjatjarag in typing the wrong collective noun. Jammer. I was embarrassed but also amazed that the linguistic gatekeepers at this newspaper—the hallowed subeditors—had not spotted this blemish on my otherwise beautifully burnished column.

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