Of English Education

Sometimes, it's quite annoying when my groupmates asked me how did I get high results in the Canadian Language Benchmark. It is really not in my nature to retort to that question with "Actually, I'm kinda good in English because I got a lot of training back at home". It is more irratating when this blonde groupmate of mine is saying "You are lucky!" Yeah, maybe I was just lucky but hey that is just a part of it. I mean just because you got poor grades in the benchmark I can't have higher grades than yours? Please, my english is a lot better than yours. A friend, a filipina, told me that maybe they were just amazed about my scores.

In my opinion, most of the Filipinos here have relatively high benchmark scores. At least 5, I guess ,which is acceptable. We can attribute this to the fact that English is a part of our curriculum since we started to attend school. It is like English is our second language. I know, the education in the Philippines is not superb and the current issue of credibility of the teachers. Let's admit it, we know at least one teacher who do english carabao. We should acknowledge the effort of the goverment to include English in the curriculum of elementary and high school education. Once, they even ordered that English will be the medium of instruction but because of our love to our national language, this was not pushed through. The result of the inclusion of English in the curriculum is almost all of those who have finished grade school can understand, write and speak english, english carabao or not.

For some fortunate students, like me, who have attended private schooling there are strict implementation of you should speak english when the subject is taught in english for some schools students were not allowed to speak in Tagalog when in class. In elementary, English is divided into two subjects, Language and Reading. In Language, you learn how to construct a sentence,subject verb agreement and writing compositions. While in Reading, you learn how to read, comprehend and vocabularies. As you progress, the lessons also progress. Complex structures of sentences, long compositions, longer readings and more vocabularies.
After attending school, our English training does not end. When we are applying for a job, we always bring some english in our pockets. Our resume is in english, job interviews are in english. Corporate correspondence is in English. It is like English is the "formal" language.

Some other reasons that Filipinos are good in English:
*The our coveted flexible tongue. Filipinos can actually learn different language easily. I read a travel book describing Filipinos as people with Californian accent.
*We love english movies and english shows.
*We love english novels. Basically we love everything "english"

In conclusion, we often took for granted our English education, we just treat it as part of our subjects that we need to pass but when you meet people who were paying just to learn English and their struggle to speak english fluently you will realize that yes,we are lucky that we got a lot of training in English and it is part of our subjects back in school.