Philippine government topbills education in proposed 2011 budget

MANILA (PNA)—Malacañang is allocating for education the lion’s share of its proposed 2011 national budget of P1.654 trillion, according to Presidential Communications Operations Office Secretary Herminio “Sonny” Coloma.

“Education is that proposal’s top priority in terms of absolute amount,” Secretary Coloma said at the Kapihan sa Sulo forum in Quezon City last August 21.

He noted this is in line with the administration’s thrust towards boosting government social services to help improve lives of people nationwide.

“Where you put your money, that’s where your strategy is,” he stressed.

Malacanang is bullish about its education bid as Coloma said figures indicate there’s more appropriation for this than for debt servicing.

He partly attributed this to restructuring of several government foreign loans—a move that helped lower the State’s debt burden.

Government was also able to pay off a significant chunk of its debt, he continued.

“For 2011, therefore, it’s clear we can have more resources for education,” he said, without mentioning specific figures.

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Interpreter needed for Pinoy beauty queens?

MANILA—Like contenders from non-English-speaking nations, Filipinos competing in international beauty pageants should be allowed to speak in Tagalog, Miss Universe 1969 Gloria Diaz has suggested.

Diaz said Filipino beauty queens should also have an option to get an interpreter like their counterparts from Venezuela and Mexico, among others.

She raised the need for an interpreter following the controversial response of Miss Universe 4th runner-up Venus Raj during the question-and-answer portion.

Like many people, Diaz said she believes that Raj lost her chance to win the coveted crown because of her much talked about “major, major” response.

“The problem I think is, like me before, she thinks in Tagalog. So, ‘major major’ is what? Malaking malaki o bonggang bongga? The context is lost or misinterpreted abroad, even among Filipinos,” said Diaz.

According to reports, Miss Universe 2010 Jimena Navarrete of Mexico opted to have an interpreter even though she can speak English.

Many were dismayed by Raj’s answer when asked by an actor judge to cite her one biggest mistake in life.

Raj’s answer was: "You know what, sir, in my 22 years of existence I can say that there’s nothing major, major problem that I’ve done in my life because I’m very confident with my family, with the love that they are giving to me. So thank you so much that I’m here. Thank you, thank you so much!”

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Public school students barely passing Filipino

MANILA—Public school students received barely passing marks in achievement tests in Filipino over the last five years, with high school students doing more poorly than grade schoolers, results of the elementary and secondary National Achievement Test (NAT) showed.

The Department of Education’s National Educational Testing and Research Center (NETRC) said that while scores had gradually improved annually, grades dropped from the mean score of 75.50 percent for elementary students to 58.18 percent for high school students in the last school year.

Scores have improved by almost 15 percentage points for elementary students from 60.68 percent in school year 2005-2006 to the latest at 75.50 percent, according to the NETRC. In comparison, scores in English ranged from 54.05 percent in 2005-2006 to last school year’s 68.51 percent.

In high school, Filipino scores were lower than grade schoolers as scores ranged from 46.66 percent from school year 2005-06 to 58.18 percent in 2009-10. Scores in English dropped from 51.2 percent five years ago to 46.86 percent in the last school year.

The figures, however, showed a silver lining: While still below the passing mark, students did best in Filipino out of all subject areas tested by the NAT and scores inched their way to the target mean score of 75 percent.

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Western schools sprout in South Korea
By Choe Sang-hun, The New York Times
 
SEOGWIPO, South Korea—Here on Jeju Island, famous for its tangerine groves, pearly beaches and honeymoon resorts, South Korea is conducting a bold educational experiment, one intended to bolster opportunity at home and attract investment from abroad.

By 2015, if all goes according to plan, 12 prestigious Western schools will have opened branch campuses in a government-financed, 940-acre Jeju Global Education City, a self-contained community within Seogwipo, where everyone — students, teachers, administrators, doctors, store clerks — will speak only English. The first school, North London Collegiate, broke ground for its campus this month.

While this is the country’s first enclave constructed expressly around foreign-style education, individual campuses are opening elsewhere. Dulwich College, a private British school, is scheduled to open a branch in Seoul, the capital, in a few weeks. And the Chadwick School of California is set to open a branch in Songdo, a new town rising west of Seoul, around the same time.

What is happening in South Korea is part of the global expansion of Western schools — a complex trend fueled by parents in Asia and elsewhere who want to be able to keep their families together while giving their children a more global and English-language curriculum beginning with elementary school, and by governments hoping for economic rewards from making their countries more attractive to foreigners with money to invest.

“We will do everything humanly possible to create an environment where your children must speak English, even if they are not abroad,” Jang Tae-young, a Jeju official, recently told a group of Korean parents.

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“Word Nerds” make mission of eradicating typos
 By Art Carey, McClatchy-Tribune Information Services
 
PHILADELPHIA— Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson, two word nerds and earnest agents of TEAL— the Typo Eradication Advancement League— visited Philadelphia last week, and within 90 minutes Center City was the better for it, orthographically speaking.

On 19th Street, at the Four Seasons Cleaners, they noticed the word cleaner’s uncalled-for apostrophe on the door of the establishment.

With permission from owner Mee Kim, Deck used his fingernail to peel off the superfluous apostrophe, a feat that would have made him beam triumphantly if he were inclined to beam.

A few doors down, a sign in the window of All About Hair advertised “5 hairstylist.” Deck, carrying his trusty Typo Correction Kit (a makeup bag filled with correction fluid, permanent markers, chalk, and Sharpies in various colors), offered to pluralize the word with an “s,” but hairstylist Rita Riccelli declined.

“Somebody told us it was spelled wrong, but I’d rather you come back when the boss is here,” Riccelli said. She promised to bring it to his attention.

On 18th Street, at the Wrap Shack kitchen and bar, among the specials on a chalkboard out front Deck and Herson spotted “chicken caeser.”

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Students have new options for books

Students are increasingly able to rent books for the semester at up to half the list price or to purchase electronic texts on devices such as Kindle, Nook or iPad. The expanded range of options comes after the National Association of College Stores predicted each student would pay an average of $667 in textbook costs this school year.

Alternatives such as these are a departure from the days when students would spend hundreds on a book and take their chances selling it back for a small fraction of the cost after exams.

“It used to be between new and used book sales,” said association spokesman Charles Schmidt. “Different people study in different ways. Now it is a choice of new, used, rental or e-book sales.”

This year’s average textbook bill is down from 2009’s $702 average bite. A big reason for this, Schmidt said, is increased used textbook sales in college bookstores. The association is hoping to drive costs down even further for students, he said, by renting texts for a semester at a fraction of the book’s original cost. The group estimates 1,500 of its 3,000 member stores will offer the service, up from 300 in 2009.

BackPackers Student Bookstores also features textbook rentals. The chain’s three Raleigh stores serve N.C. State University, and its new rental policy saves students up to 60 percent off the list price of textbooks, depending on the likelihood of the book getting resold later. Students pay the rental price and keep the books for the semester, turning them in after exams. There are no refunds like those of a buyback sale, but the initial cost of getting the text is less.

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Student reading scores in state best in years

For the first time in years, more than half of California’s public school students are reading at grade level or above, new test results showed Monday.

“This is cause for excitement,” said California’s schools chief Jack O'Connell. “Despite consistent, severe and devastating (budget) cuts, our schools continue to prepare our students.”

Of the nearly 5 million students in grades two to 11 tested in reading last spring - including students whose first language isn't English - 52 percent scored “proficient or above,” continuing a trend of yearly improvement since 2003, when just 35 percent of students read at that level.

Looking at native English speakers alone, reading proficiency climbed to 60 percent - and rose to 69 percent among bilingual English speakers, the test results showed.

Students did less well on the elementary math portion of the California Standards Test (grades two through seven), with 48 percent scoring at least proficient. But proficiency has also steadily improved, up from 35 percent in 2003, the state Department of Education reported.

Fewer than a third of students taking algebra I, algebra II or geometry scored proficient.

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Lodi students take a dip in math results, but improve in English

Local sophomores have taken a slight dip compared to their counterparts statewide when it comes to passing the math portion of the annual state high school exit exam. Results were released Tuesday.

“We are encouraged by the increase in the number of students passing the English-language arts sub-test on their first attempt,” said Ed Eldridge, Lodi Unified School District's coordinator for assessment, research and evaluation. “In fact, the 2010 school year represented the second year in a row that there was an increase in the percent of LUSD students passing this sub-test.”

The exam was given earlier this year to 10th-graders in the subjects of math and English-language arts, and based on the California state standards which define what students should be learning each year.

Students must pass the California High School Exit Exam to graduate from high school. Those who do not pass the tests in 10th grade have at least five more opportunities to do so before the end of the school year. The next time it will be administered is in November.
But the test is designed so that most students should be able to pass it on their first attempt, according to local officials. In Lodi Unified, for example, 8 out of 10 first-time test takers do so, according to Eldridge.
The latest state data indicate that an increasing percentage of students statewide are passing the CAHSEE in the 10th grade, which is the first opportunity students have to take it.

Some 80.6 percent of the Class of 2012 has already passed the English-language arts portion, compared to 79.2 percent of 10th-graders in the Class of 2011.

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One-third of university students unhappy with lecturers’ performance
By Richard Garner, Education Editor

Thousands of university students still find their lecturers too remote despite pledges that standards of service would improve with the introduction of top-up fees of up to £3,225 a year.

A national survey by the Higher Education Funding Council for England showing the level of student satisfaction with their courses reveals there has been no improvement in three years.

Overall, 82 per cent are satisfied with their course – but the figure dips to 67 per cent when it comes to assessment of their work and the feedback they get from lecturers.

Satisfaction has fallen over learning resources – down from 80 per cent to 79 per cent – and this area is likely to be slashed again next year as universities brace themselves for further cuts.

Aaron Porter, president of the National Union of Students, described the survey as “a wake-up call to vice-chancellors,” adding: “They must buck up their ideas and do far more to improve the experience they offer to students.”

David Willetts, Universities secretary, added the survey “reflects real and persistent concerns over the feedback given on students' work and I hope the sector will address that.”

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Federal government moves to save Nigeria’s vanishing indigenous languages

The Federal Government is in a desperate move to save the over 500 indigenous languages spoken in different parts of Nigeria from possible extinction. The dominance of Western culture in the daily life of the average Nigerian is affecting the spoken ability of the mother tongue users.

The growing trend of increased urbanization has further aggravated the situation to the extent that in most families in Nigerian cities, English is the only acceptable means of communication between parents and their children, thus putting their local dialect at great risk of extinction.

However, the executive secretary, Nigerian Educational Research Development Council (NERDC), Professor Godswill Obioma, attributed this factor to lack of an acceptable National Language Policy, saying that the over 500 languages spoken in different parts of Nigeria may die in this century if nothing was done to reclaim them.

In response to the yearning of the Federal Government to bridge this gap, Obioma, accordingly inaugurated a National Technical Committee on the development of a National Language Policy at a ceremony held at the Council Headquarters, Sheda, Abuja, with a clear mandate to develop a blue print on Nigeria’s National Language Policy.

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Professor of swearing looks Down Under

Victoria University’s 2010 Ian Gordon Fellow is, among other things, an expert in swearing and the linguistic taboos of the English language.

Speaking in Wellington on 7 September, Professor Kate Burridge, who is Chair of Linguistics in the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University, Melbourne, will tackle the topic of swearing and taboo language in antipodean English.

She says swearing is a “particularly rich area of creativity” engaged in by ordinary New Zealand and Australian English speakers.

“Bad language has always been characterised as an earmark of Australian and New Zealand English. I’d like to ask the question how uniquely antipodean it is,” she says.

Professor Burridge, who is in New Zealand for three public lectures, says she will provide an account of antipodean swearing patterns, based on examples from written and spoken data. In her other free public lectures she will discuss the French influence on English, and the ways English is changing and developing.

Her visit to Victoria University is courtesy of the Ian Gordon Fellowship, which was set up to support and promote the study of English language and linguistics at Victoria.

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Business English revives schools
By Akiko Inoue, Yomiuri Shimbun

The recent corporate trend of making English the “official language” within companies has given a tailwind to the formerly faltering English language school business.

As a number of companies aim to establish or maintain a global presence, English language schools are working to develop educational programs more practical than those offered by their rivals for businesspeople who need to use English at work.

Such a move came after companies, including online shopping mall operator Rakuten, Inc. and Fast Retailing Co., the operator of casual clothing chain Uniqlo, required their employees to use English as their official in-house language.

The English education-related industry has striven to capitalize on what it views as a golden opportunity.

During the April-June period, Berlitz Japan, Inc., an operator of foreign language schools, saw the number of its corporate customers and individual regular students who are company employees jump 50 percent from a year earlier. Its summer short program also has attracted about 2-1/2 times as many students as in the previous year.

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English-language pulp fiction translates to success in India
By Emily Wax, Washington Post Foreign Service

CHENNAI, INDIA—Hindi and Tamil paperbacks, the gaudy equivalent of American dime novels and British penny dreadfuls, were a staple of old India, sold at the country’s railway stations, bus depots and chai stands. Now, a push to translate them into English is creating new fans for the genre among middle- and upper-class Indians.

Thousands of such titles were published starting in the 1920s. Many are household names. They include campy vampire serials, supernatural thrillers, and a slew of Hindi crime novels featuring fast-talking detectives, multiple murders and crowds of prostitutes. Pulp fiction written in Tamil, a major language of South India, is peopled with Hindu sorcerers, overblown evil scientists and tortured inter-caste lovers.

“These stories are from the heart of India,” said Kaveri Lalchand, co-director of Chennai’s Blaft Publications, which has issued several popular English-language anthologies of Tamil yarns rounded up from household cupboards and coffeehouses. “What’s great about them is that they’re not being written abroad or by people sitting in universities.”

The healthy sales of the nostalgia-infused collections show how big India’s English-language book industry has grown and how willing it is to take risks with more avant-garde publications, according to Pritham Chakravarthy, who translated the 17 stories in “The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction.”

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Fadeout for a culture that’s neither Indian nor British
By Mian Ridge, International Herald Tribune

CALCUTTA—Entering the crumbling mansion of the Lawrence D’Souza Old Age Home here is a visit to a vanishing world.

Breakfast tea from a cup and saucer, Agatha Christie murder mysteries and Mills & Boon romances, a weekly visit from the hairdresser, who sets a dowager’s delicate hair in a 1940s-style wave. Sometimes, a tailor comes to make the old-style garments beloved by Anglo-Indian women of a certain age. Floral tea dresses, for example.

“On Sundays, we listen to jive, although we don’t dance much anymore,” Sybil Martyr, a 96-year-old retired schoolteacher, said with a crisp English accent.

“We’re museum pieces,” she said.

The definition has varied over time, but under the Indian Constitution the term Anglo-Indian means an Indian citizen whose paternal line can be traced to Europe. Both of Mrs. Martyr’s grandfathers were Scots.

Like most Anglo-Indian women of her generation, she has lived all her life in India and has never been to Britain. But she converses only in English. At school, she said, she learned a little Latin and French and enough “kitchen Bengali” to speak to servants.

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High court in India raps the government for its language policy

BANGALORE—Pulling up the state government for not obeying the full Bench verdict on the language policy, the Karnataka High Court has asked it to consider a fresh application filed by Rashtrotthana Parishat, seeking permission to start an English-medium school, purely in terms of the July 2, 2008 verdict.

“How can you do this? What you have done is unconstitutional. I remember having quashed 500 such endorsements. The verdict of the full Bench is the law of the land,” Justice S Abdul Nazeer observed while allowing the petition.

The Rashtrotthana Parishat, a wing of the RSS in the state, filed the petition seeking direction to the authorities to consider its application for starting an English-medium school in the city.

The organization, which is running around 30 educational institutions in the state, has challenged the endorsement of the February 27, 2009 order issued by the DDPI, Bangalore South, rejecting its application. The authorities had rejected the proposal on the ground that the SLP filed by the state is yet to be decided by the apex court, with regard to the 1994 language policy.

The high court ordered issuance of notice to the vice-chancellor of Mysore University, with regard to a petition filed by 22 students who studied in the affiliated colleges of the University between 2002 to 2009. The petitioners have challenged the withdrawal of degrees conferred by the University on grounds of a controversy regarding obtaining marks card through fraudulent means.

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English as Morocco’s second language
By Nabila Taj, Global Voices Online

In a recent interview with African Writing Online, Laila Lalami, a Moroccan-American author, elaborates on her educational upbringing. Lalami grew up speaking Moroccan Arabic, but it was not until she was a teenager that she “finally came across Moroccan novels, written by Moroccan authors, and featuring Moroccan characters.” This is primarily because Lalami attended a French school as a child. She says:

“French was the language in which I was first exposed to literature, beginning with children’s comics like Tintin and Asterix, through young adult novels like those of Alexandre Dumas, all the way to classics like those of Victor Hugo.”

Nonetheless, Lalami published her first novel, Secret Son, in English after earning a Ph.D in linguistics from the University of Southern California.

Lalami’s experience is quite common for a student in Morocco. Said Bellari, a writer for Moroccoboard.com, advocates the gradual eradication of the dependence on the French language, and the introduction of English as the official second language of Morocco. In his essay, he introduces a newfangled concept known as “disliteracy:”

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Building bridges through the English language in Hungary

BUDAPEST—A total of 45 English-language students and their teachers from Hungary and six other countries participated in a U.S. Embassy-sponsored summer camp on the theme “Teaching Tolerance through English” at Lake Balaton from July 31 to August 14.

The students and teachers engaged in a variety of athletic, theatrical, artistic and educational activities designed to promote tolerance and an appreciation of each other’s cultures while enhancing their English language skills.

After the two-week program, students will continue their joint projects via e-mail and exchange visits. The program is fully sponsored by the American Embassy in Budapest, and the U.S. Embassies in Bulgaria, Kosovo, Lithuania, Montenegro, Romania, and Serbia.

Visiting the camp on August 12, Ambassador Kounalakis said that a real strength of the camp was in facilitating communication. He encouraged all of the students to continue the work they have begun at camp and to be leaders in building understanding and cohesion in their communities and across peoples.

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