Businessmen, educators support adding 2 years to Philippine basic education

MANILA (PNA)—A group composed of the country’s leading businessmen and education personalities championing education reforms has expressed its support to the plan of the Department of Education (DepEd) to add two more years or “senior high school” to the current 10-year basic education curriculum.

In a statement, the Philippine Business for Education (PBEd) said the plan unveiled by Education Secretary Armin Luistro during the World Teachers Day celebration was long overdue, and they called on education stakeholders, including the business community, to support the plan.

“We at Philippine Business for Education or PBEd welcome the government’s strong resolve to finally put in place a decades-old proposal for a K+12 basic education cycle. PBEd reiterates that the additional years in basic education cannot be separated from the issue of poor quality of the education system,” the group’s statement said.

The PBED added: “Forcing into 10 years a curriculum that is learned by the rest of the world in 12 years has resulted in poor performance by our students. This, over and above the poor quality and lack of teachers, textbooks and workbooks and facilities, continues to make learning a growing challenge for more and more of our students.”

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Philippine government to push for revised Magna Carta for Teachers

MANILA (PNA)—The Aquino administration will continue to push for the revised Magna Carta for Teachers to ensure a better working environment for the mentors and support the continuing capacity-building of teachers.

The Department of Education (DepEd) said it would continue promoting accountability among teachers and encourage them to organize themselves into forming professional learning communities in support of improving student learning approaches.

Education Secretary Armin Luistro said in a speech marking the World Teachers’ Day celebration on Tuesday morning that this recognition “has been long in coming.”

“We applaud the move to honor them by dedicating one day each year to teachers and the nobility of purpose and profession that they all stand for,” Luistro said.

He said that the DepEd is striving hard to support the educational efforts of the teachers by making teacher education and development a second key reform thrust of the Basic Education Sector Reform Agency, aimed at improving learning outcomes through improved teaching quality.

According to Luistro, the DepEd is now using the Competency-Based Teacher Standards (CBTS) for recruitment, selection and hiring of teachers to ensure that only the best will mentor the learners.

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English blamed for poor literacy of Filipinos

MANILA—The use of English as a medium of instruction even for starter learners may be the reason why some nine million Filipinos aged 10 to 64 find it difficult to read, write, compute and comprehend, according to an education official.

Education Undersecretary Yolanda Quijano said that the use of a secondary language in classroom instruction inhibits learning among young students, eventually leading to poor literacy skills when they become adults.

“Maybe it’s because our children are taught in English,” Quijano, a veteran educator, said. “They are trained to listen but because they don’t have the facility of the language they cannot answer back what they think and what they’re feeling.”

The 2008 Functional Literacy and Mass Media Survey (FLEMMS) of the National Statistics Office, released in September this year, found that one out of every 10 Filipinos is functionally illiterate, meaning they have difficulty with basic life skills like reading, writing, calculating and understanding.

The FLEMMS survey, the fourth nationwide literacy study since 1989, found that nine million, or some 13.4 percent of 67 million Filipinos, fell below the literacy gauge pegged on these practical skills.

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Philippines has too many universities, says its Commission on Higher Education

MANILA—The Commission on Higher Education (CHED) is zeroing in on the excessive number of higher education institutions (HEIs) in the country as one of the major causes of the deteriorating quality of higher education.

Dr. Patricia Licuanan, CHED chair, said the proliferation of colleges and universities offering degree programs is making it hard for CHED to check on the quality of programs offered to students.

“We have too many HEIs offering too many programs,” Licuanan told teachers gathered at the University of Asia and the Pacific auditorium recently for the Metrobank Foundation’s launch of celebrations in connection with World Teachers’ Day on Oct. 5.

Licuanan said as of their latest count, there are 2,180 HEIs nationwide, quite a big number considering the country’s size and population of college students.

Of this number, Licuanan said 88 percent are private institutions while the remaining 12 percent are state colleges and universities.

The CHED chief said they will check on the quality of courses offered by all these HEIs to identify which schools should be encouraged to discontinue certain programs, if not close down altogether.

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Philippine Education Department bares 12-year education plan

MANILA—The Department of Education (DepEd) yesterday unveiled its ambitious 12-year basic education curriculum (BEC) plan that could change the current structure from 10 years with six years of elementary level and four years of high school to a combined Grades 1 to 12 path.

Former DepEd undersecretary Isagani Cruz bared the plan before education stakeholders and the media. Cruz, an education columnist of The STAR, has been tapped by DepEd to present the plan dubbed the “K+12 Basic Education Cycle” that would add two years to the BEC. He said the program would address the major deficiency found by other countries in the Philippine education system.

“Internationally, we’re one of only 2 countries with less than 11 years (of BEC),” Cruz said. “We’re teaching 12 years’ worth of knowledge and skills in 10 years. In the process, we’re shortchanging the students. That is not good for students. We’re trying to cram everything in 10 years,” he said.

Cruz said the Philippines had joined Myanmar in having a BEC of less than 11 years. Developed and developing countries in Europe such as England have a 14-year BEC, Scotland has 13, Russia has 11; the US has 12 and in the Asian region, Malaysia has 13-year BEC; Singapore, Japan, India, China, Indonesia, and South Korea have 12.

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Japan teachers may get English training in U.S.

The Japanese and U.S. governments are considering the establishment of a program that would send young Japanese teachers of English to the United States to improve their English ability, it has been learned.

Prime Minister Naoto Kan plans to expand cultural, intellectual and human exchanges between the two countries, in addition to security and economic cooperation as part of the government’s efforts to deepen the Japan-U.S. alliance. The government intends to reach an official agreement that includes the English-teacher plan when U.S. President Barack Obama visits Japan in the middle of next month.

The government envisions training young English-language teachers at primary, middle and high schools in the United State for periods of one to two years.

If 1,000 teachers were dispatched to the United States for one year at an estimated cost of 10 million yen per person, the government would require about 10 billion yen annually to fund the program.

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English students to receive certificates

Students from around the world will pick up English language certificates at a presentation ceremony on October 20.

Around 400 students completed English for Speakers of Other Languages courses run by Wolverhampton City Council’s Adult Education Service and around 150 of them will attend the event at the Alan Garner Centre to receive their certificates.

People from across the globe, including Eastern Europe, Asia, The Middle East and Africa, successfully passed modules covering reading, writing, speaking and listening after taking a year-long course run by the Adult Education Service.

Bruce Parsons, the Adult Education Service’s English for Speakers of Other Languages manager, said: “The students have worked hard to gain their certificates and I am delighted for them.

“They chose to study English for a variety of reasons, from helping to find employment or to gain access to Higher Education to simply being more able to involve themselves and their families in life in the UK.”

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Will online training fail new English-language teachers?

Early on during a Celta course—the initial teacher training certificate offered by Cambridge Esol—the instructor is likely to give trainees a taste of communicative language learning by teaching them the equivalent of “My name is ...” and “What is your name?” in a suitably obscure foreign language.

The aim of the exercise is not to make trainees more polyglot, but to give them an insight into the emotions that adults experience when they find themselves in a group of strangers and are asked to, in effect, make fools of themselves. As the trainees mangle pronunciation, forget a phrase repeated only moments before and wait nervously for their turn to speak in front of the class, they are getting an insight into the learner experience that should make them more intuitive and effective teachers when they enter the classroom for the first time.

This learning-by-doing approach has helped to establish the Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults, to give it its full title, as a benchmark for the training of people who want to enter the ELT profession, but plans by Cambridge Esol to introduce a version of the Celta course that combines tutorials delivered online with face-to-face teaching practice is raising concerns that this “gold standard” could be undermined.

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Teaching model aims to help English-language learnersm

ILLINOIS—Glen Ellyn School District 41 is implementing a new instructional model to address the educational and linguistic needs of English language learners while simultaneously teaching other students in the classroom.

Teachers districtwide began training this summer on the research-based model known as Sheltered Instruction Observed Protocol.

According to the Center for Applied Linguistics, the SIOP model addresses the academic needs of English-learning students in the United States through eight interrelated components: lesson preparation, building background, comprehensible input, strategies, interaction, practice/application, lesson delivery and review/assessment.

“It’s a system of steps that you go through in a lesson that has to do with science or social studies typically, but you can use it with anything,” said Teresa Shea, English language learning teacher at Ben Franklin Elementary School, where a group of teachers received training during the summer.

Using the eight components, teachers design and deliver lessons that cater to English learners and other students at the same time.

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Hone your tech skill, hold on English, says former high university official

MANGALORE—Prof Abdul Rahiman, former vice-chancellor of Kannur and Calicut Universities, suggested that students hone their computer knowledge and English language skills and publish research findings in reputed journals and magazines.

He was speaking during the inaugural of Anveeksha 2010, the National Level Paper Presentation Competition organized by the IT students of AIMIT, St Aloysius College at Beeri near here on Tuesday.

He also surged students to make use of god-given opportunities to come up in life. He compared his time when they had to struggle just to get references and abstracts of publications. “There was no easy access to journals. The present generation of scholars have access to journals and in a split second access any article and publication from anywhere in the world,: he noted.

Fr Denzil Lobo, Director, AIMIT, talked about the drastic changes that have taken place during the last 150 years and he spoke about the technological innovations that would happen by 2050. He mentioned about the flying cars, teleportation, ubiquitous computing devices, chips which could sense one’s own thoughts, and the feelings of others. He also mentioned the future developments which would be in the field of computers, smart travel, and smart communication devices, media and public services.

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University favors ICT for effective English teaching

TIRUCHI—Bharathidasan University is likely to integrate Information and Communication Technology (ICT ) into English language teaching at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

Interaction arising from technology integration through power point presentations would particularly generate learning interest among rural students; the approach would make education relevant to the knowledge society, according to Vice-Chancellor K. Meena. Use of ICT would enable effective interactive learning, she said, observing that the process of audio conversion to text in language laboratories helps students a lot to assimilate listening skill.

Dr. Meena on Monday suggested to Head of the University’s Department of English V. Ayothi, who coordinated the 21-day refresher training programme for English teachers at the Academic Staff College, that a manual be created based on the feedback of the participants for consideration of the Board of Studies for English Language and Literature.

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Rwanda wants 1,000 English teachers

Rwanda needs close to 1,000 English teachers following the country’s switch from French to English as the language of instruction in schools.

Rwanda wants teachers from Uganda and other neighboring countries to support its switch to English.

The teachers will be posted to various primary and junior secondary schools. Others are slated to get jobs at the government’s International Languages and Management Institute (ILMI), which was commissioned early this year to teach English to local citizens, business executives, and public officials English.

Aggrey Kibenge, Uganda’s education ministry’s spokesperson, said in a press statement that Rwanda communicated about the vacancies on September 27, 2010.

“The Education Service Commission in collaboration with the ministry of education of Rwanda announced that the government of Rwanda has embarked on a massive recruitment of teachers of English,” he wrote. “Teachers (will be sourced) from within and outside Rwanda; including the East African Community region.”

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Use of English undermines Setswana, says critic                               

Kgosi Kgolo Kgafela of Bakgatla says the Ministry of Education and Skills Development’s response to his idea that children should be taught in Setswana, is unreasonable and unintelligible.

Kgafela had suggested that the Ministry should consider teaching school subjects in Setswana as a way of preserving the language.

The Ministry dismissed the idea as impractical because many books are already written in English, the Setswana vocabulary is still developing and government’s policy provides that only Standard One should be taught in the medium of Setswana. The Principal Public Relations Officer further pointed out that Tswana speakers would be at a disadvantage when interacting with other nations because English is an international language.

Kgafela said the Ministry’s response clearly indicates that Setswana has been made subservient to English. “It’s an indication that we don’t believe in our natural habitat and do not care about our language,” he said.

In other countries such as China, Germany and the Middle East, books are written in the local tongues; even in neighboring South Africa, books are written in the different indigenous languages despite South Africa using English as its international language. “Why can’t this happen here; how do those who achieve it, do it? This is because people look down on their language,” Kgosi Kgafela II said.

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