The English problem

Rector Fr. Rolando de la Rosa, O.P. has tapped the Faculty of Arts and Letters to lead what he contemplates to be a university-wide English proficiency campaign. He has drafted Artlets to the experiment, arguing that students from the faculty should be the most articulate in the University.

Artlets Dean Michael Anthony Vasco has accepted the Rector’s challenge, and so during the Artlets faculty general assembly, he told professors to be more vigilant in the use of English as the medium of instruction and as medium of communication. The latter, according to Vasco, means that English is not only used in the classroom and all academic discourses, oral or written, but also in “business transactions, co-curricular and extra-curricular activities, (including) plays, projects, scripts and productions.”

The new campaign stemmed from surveys among employers in the country and abroad which disclosed that while UST graduates are competent and hardworking and generally enjoy high manpower ratings, they have woeful communication skills, which may not qualify them for higher leadership and managerial positions.

The Varsitarian, a general-interest campus newspaper in English, is generally uncomfortable with any attempt to make English the lingua franca especially in a university that was founded by Spanish Dominicans and in a nation whose revolution was undercut by Anglo-American imperialism. In the postcolonial era, reimposing English as the lingua franca appears much like a renewed obeisance to the metropolis.

But the Varsitarian also believes that Filipinos should not lose their historic facility for English which allows them access to knowledge, science and technology from abroad. There is a need to brush up on the language, especially for UST, which has seen the rise in its foreign-student population, notably Koreans who want to immerse themselves in the English language and in the culture of the Philippines.

But the Varsitarian also believes that the “English problem” is a deep-seated problem with deep-seated roots that cannot be solved overnight. Definitely producing a new generation of proficient English speakers all of a sudden is close to impossible. It would require the University to undo the damage of 10 years of poor English language training caused by elementary and high schools. Come to think of it, UST students, like most Filipinos, are not only bad in English, they’re also bad in Filipino: they just reflect the general language retrogression of the Philippine population as a whole: Filipinos are hardly good in English or in their own tongue.

The language students use in their homes and the language training that they received from a decrepit and corrupt basic education system before entering UST are some of the factors that should be taken into consideration.

UST itself should start a serious language reform on campus by checking poor English instruction—or any language instruction for that matter, be it Filipino or Spanish. Even UST students would attest that language teachers are hardly models of language fluency.

And while there are now separate departments for English and Filipino to address the reform of language instruction, the language departments could only do so much. People after all don’t learn language for pure linguistic reasons: they learn it not to get a high from grammar, orthography and semantics, but to learn the culture that is behind the language, to experience new worlds, new expressions! Therefore, language instruction does not really end there: it should lead the student to an appreciation of the highest thought in the best expression (as Matthew Arnold defines culture). In short, language instruction is merely a channel for higher realms—for culture and the humanities.

But alas, UST has been dealing the hammer blows on the humanities for several years now. Only five out of colleges in UST now offer Humanities or Art Appreciation. Some of the cretin-bound deanships and faculties have replaced Literature with Technical Writing. Time was when the graduates of the pre-Med courses of UST could quote Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Joaquin. (They’re still around at the UST Hospital where one of them, upon learning that her patient was from Artlets, started talking about the fiction of Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn; where Dr. Dante Lerma reads avidly art criticism and paints great canvases outside of the clinic; and where stalks the ghost of the late Dr. Gregorio Moral, who won the Centennial Literature Prize in 1998.) But those times are fading fast.

UST should restore key humanities and communication courses if it wants to make a dent on the English problem. The removal of the Speech and Drama subject became a bane to the English language mastery of students since the substitute Oral Communications focuses on the theory rather than the application of the spoken language––an absolute bore on the part of the students. Also, very few colleges in the University have a speech laboratory; sad to say, even Artlets does not have one.

The curbing of Humanities subjects seen in many colleges also contribute to the poor English proficiency of Thomasians since lessening humanities subjects is tantamount to reducing the opportunity of the students to read canonical texts and perform them. Fluency in English and other language is inextricably linked to reading and performance.

The English reform also entails strict and stern filtering of appalling campus posters such as “Welcome freshmen!” or “Welcome back Thomasians!” (What happened to the comma before the addressee?) The administration should also correct organizations with problematic names such as the Tomasian Cable TV (Tomcat), which wrongfully mixes Anglicism and Latinism: why not “Thomasian Cable TV (Thomcat)” or “Tomasino Cable TV (Tomcat)”?

And while we’re at it, why not implement a general reform of language instruction. Filipinos should not only be good in English, but also in Filipino and Spanish. UST has had an enviable record in language reforms: it was the first or among the first to put up departments for English, Spanish and Tagalog. The Varsitarian was founded by Jose Villa Panganiban, who became the first head of the National Language Institute and who was a linguist adept in Tagalog, English, and Spanish. The Varsitarian was the first to come up with a Tagalog (later Filipino) section. And UST itself ran Spanish and Tagalog daily newspapers (the Libertas and the Kalayaan). It once published the Spanish campus organ, Voz Estudiantil. And UST has produced the foremost Filipino men and women of letters in Tagalog, English and Spanish. So why can’t the University restore the old glory?