Language Colonialism by Claudio V. Tabotabo, MA (January, 2007)

A student asked me why the English speaking policy of TIP did not work well as implemented. I could not give the student a direct and scientific answer. All I got was a humble opinion. It was not the problem of implementation or the people who implemented the policy, but the supposed speakers themselves were the problem (i.e. students and teachers).

Teachers come to the refuge by saying students cannot understand them in English so they are forced to speak in vernacular. The same lament was with the students; they cannot get what the teacher is saying in English.

The point I cannot understand well is that, subjects dealing with figures and numbers are developed in the countries where English is a language and brought to the Philippines in textbooks with English as a medium of instruction and yet these subjects could not be explained well in English.

Readiness does not only mean mastery of what to teach. Teaching methodology always enclosed the kind of language that fit with the learners and not of the teachers. The Ph Ds have their own level of communication, the poets have their own, the novelists have their own and the college students have their own and these levels could not be interchanged with each other. An instructor said students in high school are difficult to teach because teachers have to choose the kind of word to be used. It is true in high school which is also true in college.

Outside the classroom there is another point that needs to be checked. The Filipinos look at English as a status symbol. That anyone who speaks English is somebody and if that somebody flowers his English with a foreign accent he is honored as “sosyal”. The celebrities for instance speak English not because they knew it or they loved it but they used English to identify themselves apart from the rest of their brown brothers. Unfortunately Filipinos learn more from the English of the celebrities than from the English of the teachers. And because the celebrities highlight their American or British accent, the Filipinos strive hard to have the same accent. What come out now is a blatant superficiality and pretensions. An indio with his colonizer’s accent remains an indio no matter what. Some groups call it “colonial caricature”.

English speaking does not mean speaking in American or British accent. The move of call centers now is not accent acquisition but accent neutralization. English speaking people by birth could not do anything than to accept the fact that original English is losing. Today there are more people who speak English who themselves are not English by birth than those who are born with the English tongue. This widening scene somehow erases the English language of William Shakespeare, the original English.

For a purpose of understanding, experts are trying to design something that would maintain the standard. But this standard is definitely not British or American. English in the textbook and words described in the dictionaries are still the most accepted one in a business world. Textbook is still the guiding map for people who venture the correct English and dictionaries are keys to the formal use of English word.

But more than anything else sociologists maintain that a culture cannot be changed by legislation. Language is part of a culture so that it cannot be legislated and cannot be changed overnight. It must be practiced until it become a tradition, and practicing it means using it in the classroom and anywhere in the campus without waiting for making it into a policy. And the prime movers of the practice are teachers.