Bulatlat

For the foreign student, learning English is only a means to an end. The option to learn English enhances his/her chances of landing a high-end job in his/her homeland. For the Filipino, on the other hand, mastery of the English language becomes essential for survival in an environment where English proficiency does not necessarily mean having a competitive edge in employment.

Foreign students arrive, fresh from their home countries. Every artifact, object, and piece of literature becomes a grammar lesson as they are quick to notice that just about everything, from road signs to instruction manuals, are printed in English. They are elated about being in the Philippines, known as a country conducive for learning English.

Taste Test

Most of these students rely on student exchange programs from their respective governments or universities in order to study in the Philippines. The rest, meanwhile, had to pay with their own resources. Kim Hyo Jin (Rika), 21, and Lee Sang Seo (Mancer), 24, hailing from South Korea and taking up journalism, got a scholarship made possible through a partnership between Hallym University and University of the Philippines-Diliman (UP Diliman).

As an international corporation offering education for foreign students proclaims, affordable overseas degrees and tuition fees, economical accommodation and living expenses, inexpensive travel cost, and student-assisted visa application all serve to market the Philippines to prospective students from other countries as “the place to be.”

To be able to study in UP, foreign students must pay the university the appropriate education development fee (EDF) per semester.

The EDF ranges from US$30 for undergraduate resident aliens to US$500 for non-resident aliens taking up graduate studies. Despite the EDF, foreign students, apparently, still find the cost of education relatively cheaper.

According to the Department of Tourism, the Philippines is the world’s third largest English-speaking nation. It is not surprising, then, that the country has become a haven for foreigners seeking to hone their English speaking skills. “My purpose of visiting is to improve my English,” says Rika with a smile, doing her best to pronounce the words properly. Says Mancer, “[Studying] English here is very cheap. I try to study English [as well as Philippine] culture and [its people’s] lifestyle.”

Slip of the tongue

The fluency of Filipinos in the English language is rooted in the years following the colonization of the Philippines by the Americans. According to Prof. Gonzalo Campoamor III, as early as 1901, free public and secular education were made available by Americans as a subtle means to further their influence. English was used as both the medium of instruction and the language in which textbooks were written to train the Filipinos to be fluent in the colonizers’ mother tongue. The American government eventually handed the educated Filipinos the proverbial keys to the city. Since then, Filipinos have boasted of their fluency in the native language of the American people.

The Philippines thus became an alternative to other countries that offer more expensive English education. According to Hannah, a Korean student taking up tourism, “[the] Philippines has [a] good educational system for studying English.” The Philippines becomes a steppingstone for foreign students on their way to succeed in an Americanized world market, where English has become the medium for business and trade.

For the foreign student, learning English is only a means to an end. The option to learn English enhances his/her chances of landing a high-end job in his/her homeland. For the Filipino, on the other hand, mastery of the English language becomes essential for survival in an environment where English proficiency does not necessarily mean having a competitive edge in employment.
Fluency in English has become almost a staple in the country, as evidenced by the recent boom of Business Process Outsourcing – the contracting of a business task to a third party service provider – such as call centers.

English proficiency in the Philippines has become an intangible, intellectual resource, an end in itself. The lack of national industries in the Philippines, moreover, limits the Filipino professional’s chances of being employed and confines his/her options to either seeking a higher-paying job abroad or working cheap for some multinational company based in the country.

Code switching

Saki Arima, 19, is currently taking up International Relations. She intends to learn more about Southeast Asian development by staying in the Philippines for six months, believing her experience in dealing with the poor communities in the country to be an asset when she graduates and goes back to Japan. Yoshio Minami, a 22-year old Japanese student, also thinks that studying in the Philippines will help him when he graduates as community development major and finds work in a non-government organization or a travel agency, due to his interest in Philippine culture and ability to speak in Tagalog – a skill he acquired from taking Tagalog as an elective in Japan.

The characteristics that foreigners often enumerate when talking about Filipinos – the very concept of “Filipino values” integrated in their psyche – have become commodified due to the government’s effort to market the Philippines as the most ideal place for foreigners to improve their English-speaking skills. The so-called traits of Filipinos – hospitable and hardworking – are geared precisely to render the country as an ideal site for foreign investment.

One can see the parallelism between cheap labor investments in the country by multinational companies and the phenomenon of foreign students flocking to the Philippines to become well-versed in the language that arguably dominates the globe.

The Filipino’s proficiency in English attests to the Philippines’ subservience to the United States’ market. Evidently, the American mother tongue has set the standard for the rest of the world. The Philippines, thus, is more of a pawn than a player in international relations.

Mancer, Rika, and many others like them continue to dream. Eventually, they will graduate. Upon returning to their home countries, they will most likely succeed in their chosen fields, whether slowly or rapidly.

Chances are, they will rise to the top of the corporate ladder, thanks in part to the English-speaking skills they acquired in the Philippines from their Filipino friends and professors. The Filipinos - the students, tutors and professors who have mastered the English language – can only both dream and dread. They dream of a life abroad and dread the prospect of being constrained to a cubicle at work, and being underpaid while answering calls for a multinational company. Philippine Collegian/posted by Bulatlat

References
Campoamor, Gonzalo III. “The Pedagogical Role of English in the Reproduction of Labor.” In Alamon , Guillermo, Lumbera, ed.
Mula Tore Patungong Palengke: Neoliberal Education in the Philippines. Philippines, Ibon Foundation Inc., 2007.