Decline of education blamed on “deterioration of English proficiency”
Such a “rapid decline in the English competency of Filipinos would eventually erode the competitiveness of the country’s human resources, both here and abroad”… A quote attributed to Senator Edgardo J. Angara.
This was in reference to a bill that passed last month restoring English as the primary language of instruction from high school onwards. The bill was created as Congress’ response to the declining proficiency on the use of the English language in communications. (The Education Department adopted a bilingual program in 1987 to promote the use of Tagalog, the other official language.)
According to a recent government study, only 7 percent of high school graduates can properly read, speak or understand English, and poorly trained teachers are partly to blame, it said.
According to a (separate) study conducted by the European Chamber of Commerce of the Philippines, 75 percent of the more than 400,000 Filipino students that graduate from college each year have “substandard English skills.”
Read the rest of thepinoy.net article and throw us your comments. What do you think? Are we better off economically using English as the primary language of instructions in school or will we lose something greater by “dropping” proficiency in our national language?
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