Teachers to undergo English proficiency testing — DepEd

English teachers in public schools will undertake a English profiency test to determine if they are qualified to teach the subject in the first place, Education Secretary Edilberto de Jesus said yesterday.

However, he quickly clarified that the move is not meant to embarass nor demote teachers but only to find out if they’re better at teaching other subjects.

English teachers who are not fluent in the language will only produce poor quality students, he told a television interview yesterday.

Teachers who fail in the proficiency test will undergo a re-training program, he said, quickly assuring that no teacher will be dismissed or demoted. The move is in line with President Arroyo’s directive last Wednesday restoring English as the medium of instruction in public and private schools.

She warned that Filipinos might lose their edge in information technology and communication if they lose their command of the language.

English was the medium of instruction in the Philippines since the 1900s, a legacy of the American colonial period that ended in 1945 and made the Philippines the only English-speaking country in Asia.

In the late 1980s, the Corazon Aquino administration — in an effort to promote national unity — ordered the switch to Filipino.

Since then, Filipinos still debate on whether English or Filipino or both should be used. Some Filipino historians blame English for Filipinos’ poor sense of history.

"My feeling is English is important because it is the language of business and globalization," professor Maria Celeste Gonzales, head of Ateneo de Manila’s department of education, told The STAR.

"At the same time, I would not want to neglect the teaching of Filipino." She said the problem of many students today is that they do not have good command of the two languages.

Sen. Tessie Aquino-Oreta said English and Filipino should both be used as media of instruction in accordance with the Constitution.

"Filipino should be promoted in schools as a language of literacy and a source of national identity and unity, while English should be encouraged as the language of science and technology, regional commerce and international communication," the former chairman of the Senate committee on education said.

Oreta cited past studies showing that the English comprehension of a sampling of elementary school teachers was equivalent to only that of a Grade 7 or first year high school student.

Lack of funds, however, might slow the presidential directive to restore English as the medium of instruction. During the Senate hearing on the budget of the Department of Education last week, de Jesus admitted that the department has no budget to upgrade the English proficiency of public school teachers. – With Romel Bagares