Teachers’ Day
Editorial, The Philippine Star 

Little girls used to dream of becoming teachers when they grow up. These days, with teachers leaving their own country to work as maids in Hong Kong and elsewhere, a career in education has lost much of its luster. Many of the country’s best educators have also left for teaching jobs overseas, lured by salaries they cannot hope to earn in their lifetime in their own country.

The result has been a national disaster, the impact of which is being felt in the poor quality of Philippine education and consequent slide in the country’s competitiveness. Other countries correctly see education as the key to national progress, and are investing heavily in all aspects of education, from the provision of more school buildings with modern facilities to the training of a large pool of teachers qualified to impart world-class education. This has not been the case in the Philippines.

Long before members of the judiciary threatened to stage protest actions against the cut in their proposed budget for next year, public school teachers have been staging mass protests and complaining about being among the most overworked and underpaid in the bureaucracy. Over the years the teachers’ workload has increased with the continuing boom in the student population, with no commensurate salary adjustments.

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“Ma’amsir” to “major major”: How English is a Philippine language
By Sam L. Marcelo, BusinessWorld

Venus Raj snatched defeat from the jaws of victory during the Miss Universe pageant when she flubbed the interview portion. Her answer to judge William Baldwin’s question “What was the one big mistake that you did in your life? And what did you do to make it right?” was so bizarre that it launched a thousand (and more) tweets and became a trending topic on Twitter.

Her 20-second reply became an international news item. It was dissected and analyzed, quoted and re-quoted until people on the street could repeat parts of it from memory: “In my 22 years of existence, I can say there is nothing major major problem that I have done in my life.”

A month later, “major major” is still a catch-phrase. And Ms. Raj, a journalism graduate who works as an information assistant, was still relevant enough to be a recurring topic at a forum held during the recent Second Access Philippine English Language Conference, which ran concurrently with the Manila International Book Fair.

“I don’t personally think that [Ms. Raj] made a mistake,” said a University of Santo Tomas (UST) professor who attended the conference. In fact, she added, “major major” has made it easier for her to teach lessons on the varieties of English.

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Education at Crossroads
By Aleck Francis “Koy-koy” T. Lim, The Bohol Standard

We’ve read many reports saying that quality of Philippine education is declining.

Depending on where you want to attack the issue, there are varied causes of this decline. And as what we had tackled before in this corner, the exodus of brilliant Filipino teachers who seek better pay abroad can be one of the relative causes of the problem. When we lose one inspiring, genius teacher, we lose thousands of opportunities for that teacher to make a difference in the lives of his/her students.

Another cause of the decline is the irrelevance of subjects being taught in high school and colleges. Some of the subjects in high school – like Filipino, Algebra, or Trigonometry – are still being taught in college when in fact they have basically the same teaching approach and coverage. A college student is supposed to be concentrating on his/her special field of interest, assuming that he/she had studied all the minor subjects in high school, but is distracted by many unimportant subjects.

On the other hand, there are those who claim that our problem in Philippine education starts in the formative years of the child. These Filipino educators argue that the use of English and Filipino in early childhood education can be damaging to a child’s mental framework.

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What impact are English-based curricula having on education?
By Abdullah Al-Shehri, Saudi Gazette

In the last few years, the number of colleges and universities nationwide has increased dramatically with the rising demand for higher educational institutions. Many of these institutions, public and private, have decided to adopt English as their medium of instruction for some, if not all, of their academic programs. This important development in higher education has led to a sudden boom in the local English language teaching industry and created a great demand for language teachers from around the world. One could argue that such a decision is one of necessity as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia marches towards a global economy in which the English language plays a vital role.

Moreover, educators and higher educational institutions have come to believe that the quality of educational output can be enhanced by putting more emphasis on the teaching of English as a Foreign Language (EFL), or by entirely shifting to English-medium curricula. Students also have come to appreciate that learning the English language increases their chances of employment upon graduation from college.

Many profit-based private schools and colleges have benefited from the new trend in education and have begun to promote themselves and their academic programs through the enhancement of their English teaching methods, the development of English-based curricula, or the adoption of new English-medium parallel programs for subjects such as science and maths.

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Why people coming to Britain should learn English
By Deborah Orr, Guardian.co.uk

A legal opinion from Matrix Chambers, commissioned by the human rights group Liberty, warns that Home Office plans to introduce an English language test for people coming to Britain to marry UK citizens could breach human rights and race relations laws. The tests will affect more than 25,000 spouses a year.

Well, Matrix is probably right. And it’s not as if it is unknown for a British person to move abroad and not learn the language. Yet it's a strange human right, this right to remain isolated from the culture in which you live, unable to talk to a doctor, or your child's teacher, or the lady at the Job Centre. It is a right that harms the person who demands it, as well as the community they wish to join.

John Humphrys recently presented a show about education, during which he visited a primary school that did very well by its children, even though many arrived there unable to speak English. Good for it, and its impressive head teacher. But, still – I remember my first day at school and how frightening it was. I think most people do. How much more frightening would that experience be, if the language the teachers used was unintelligible? Presumably the vast majority of people who wish to come to Britain and marry intend to have children too. Is this a right worth defending really, the right to impede the development of your children?

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“Konglish” is confusing
By Rick Ruffin, YonhapNews

SEOUL—When an American man went to Seoul’s Yonsei University to study Korean years ago, the textbooks and the teachers were both full of Konglish which, in its simplest terms, is the use of English words and phrases in a Korean context.

He complained to his teacher, and she just said, “If you want to hear pure Korean, go to North Korea.” Hmm. Now, there’s an idea.

No language is free from the influence of foreign words. In France, there exists the state-funded Academie francaise to help protect and preserve the French language, and in Singapore the government publicly discourages people from the use of “Singlish.”

In South Korea, there appears little concerted government efforts to keep the Korean language pure. Korean newspapers churn out more Konglish each day, adding word after word to an already staggering warehouse of lexicon.

 Many of these words, bandied about under the general rubric of “Konglish,” have murky origins in non-English-speaking countries, and came to South Korea via Japan, according to linguistic experts.

King Sejong of Korea’s last kingdom, Joseon (1392-1910), introduced the Korean script, known as Hangeul, roughly half a millennium ago to boost literacy and decrease reliance on burdensome Chinese characters.

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What language will you curse in when China rules the world?
By Venkatesan Vembu, DNAIndia

A new dictionary, out from Oxford University Press, incorporates some very earthy Chinese slang expressions and new words, including some that you can’t invoke without having to rinse your mouth out with soap. (Now, you’re dying to know what they are, aren't you?)

Although these street-talk words (among other more socially acceptable words) only made it to the parallel universe of the Oxford English-Chinese, Chinese-English dictionary—not the more definitive Oxford English Dictionary—it has set off a frisson of etymological excitement among folks in China. Some see it as the beginning of a lexicographic lead-in to a world that will, progressively, speak Chinese—and in countless other ways be ‘Sinified’ by Chinese soft-power influences.

It’s hard, of course, to make a linear connection between a few cuss words making it to a Chinese-English dictionary, and definitive prophesies that ‘China will rule the world’.

After all, mainstream English language (and even the OED) has incorporated many words with roots in Indian languages—“juggernaut,” “catamaran,” “mulligatawny” and “jugaad” (among others) — but we Indians don’t exactly have the world in our pockets. And although the British have also hungrily appropriated our curry as their ‘national dish’, we don’t really have the world eating out of our hands.

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Japanese students and politeness
By Mike Guest, The Daily Yomiuri

Leave it up to academics to take something that should be simple and make a long, complicated theory out of it. Politeness, for example. Your mother taught you about being polite, right? Something like: Treat others the way you’d like to be treated, show kindness and respect to others, don't make trouble.

But Mom’s advice wasn't enough for linguists Stephen Levinson and Penelope Brown. In 1987, they produced the seminal work on politeness theory, a 364-page tome titled, Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage.

It is always dangerous to summarize a lengthy work in just a few sentences, but then again you do read this column for the danger, right? So, here goes: Brown and Levinson are not concerned about prescriptions for being polite but rather a linguistic description as to what constitutes politeness. And not only for English speakers but, as the title implies, for all languages.

Their focus is largely upon face-threatening speech acts. These FTA’s (to use the common abbreviation) form the core of the theory. The basic notion is that under normal circumstances people try to behave (and speak) in a manner that preserves both their own face and the face of others. (No, face is not just an Asian concept.)

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Don’t blame JET for Japan’s poor English
By Debito Arudou, Japan Times

The Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme, touted as the world’s largest cultural exchange scheme, has brought thousands of non-Japanese into the country to teach at local boards of education. These days, with many government programs being told to justify their existence, a debate is raging over whether JET should be left as is, cut or abolished entirely.

Essentially, the two main camps argue: (a) keep JET, because it gives outback schools more contact with “foreign culture” (moreover, it gives Japan a means of projecting “soft power” abroad); versus (b) cut or abolish JET — it’s wasteful, bringing over generally untrained and sometimes unprofessional kids, and offers no measurable benefit (see Japan’s bottom-feeding TOEFL test scores in Asia).

The debate, however, needs to consider: (1) JET’s misconstrued mandate, and (2) Japan’s psychotic—yes, psychotic—system of language teaching.

First, when critics point to Japan’s bad English, bear in mind that ESL (English as a Second Language) instruction was not JET’s foremost aim.

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How far do we push the language envelope?
By Hau Boon Lai, The Star.my

To describe or to prescribe, that is the question linguists and users have to face when dealing with language.

Have you ever felt like you are the only one left in the world who thinks the phrasal verb “impact on” should not be used? Do you cringe each time you hear someone say: “this action impacts (on) the bottom line negatively” instead of “this action has a negative impact on the bottom line”?

If so, welcome to the club of English language users on the more prescriptive side fighting a losing battle against the more descriptive users who believe that it is the job of linguists to document the language and not to dictate what people say or write in a language.

In other words, if large numbers of people began to use “impact on” as a phrasal verb frequently enough, descriptive linguists will include the meaning of the verb impact as “having a strong effect” in the dictionary, acknowledging that common usage is the rule of thumb.

This is on top of the usual meanings of the word as a verb of “coming into forcible contact with another object”, as in “the shell impacted only metres away from him”, and of “pressing something firmly”, as in “human feet impact and damage the soil less than the hooves of horses and cows do”.

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