A New Approach to the Teaching of English

in the Philippines
Teodoro A. Llamzon
Ateneo de Manila University

1. Introduction
With few exceptions, one can say that English teachers have had little
success in the Philippines for the past seventy years. Several reasons can
be cited by way of explanation for this situation: lack of textbooks (both
quantitatively and qualitatively speaking), lack of equipment, even lack of
proper teacher training.
It is also probably true to say that an important reason for this situa-
tion is the use of the wrong variety of English as target language. As a
young English teacher friend of mine, an American, said to me, &dquo;I cant
understand it. These students perform well and imitate exactly all the fine
points of intonation and pronunciation in the classroom; but once out-
side, they seem to forget all that they have learned!&dquo;

2. Significance of SFE Studies

It goes without saying that the choice of the right variety of the target
language makes a big difference in the eventual success or failure of a
language course. It is a function of motivation in language learning -the
&dquo;integrative&dquo; type of motivation as Wallace Lambert found out (1961) and
the &dquo;social&dquo; types of motivation as William Labov (1963) discovered.
Moreover, it is a function of the right type of &dquo;contexts&dquo;, which are neces-
sary for cultural background and reinforcement, as Wallace Lambert, J.
Havelka, and C. Crosby (1966) showed.
The question has often been asked by serious English teachers in the
Philippines whether the type of English which educated Filipinos speak
on formal occasions, i.e. the so-called &dquo;Standard Filipino English&dquo; (SFE

henceforth) could not be used as target language instead of the American

or British varieties. If the answer to this question is affirmative, then per-
haps a new approach to the teaching of English in the Philippines could
be developed, using SFE as the target language.
30
 However, before such a variety of English could be employed as target
language in our schools, it was obvious that several fundamental questions
must first be answered. Among these were: first, does such a variety of
English actually exist in the Philippines; second, if it exists, what are its
norms of acceptability; and third, is there indeed a &dquo;standard&dquo; way of

speaking SFE throughout the country ? This report is concerned with the
recent experiments conducted to answer these questions and with the
materials which were prepared based on the formal style of SFE.
3. Studies So Far on SFE
To answer the first question in the affirmative, namely, that SFE is a
reality, one must establish several facts, among which the most important
a.re : (a) that there is a community of speakers of SFE; (b) that these speak-
ers are &dquo;native speakers&dquo; of the language; {c) that the speech community
is sizeable; and (d) its speakers can be understood by other English speakers.
The existence of a speech community is a pre-requisite for a language
variety to arise. Language is a tool of communication by means of which
a group of people interact. Once one group is separated from another
either in time or space, there immediately arise several peculiarities of
pronunciation and expression such that after a while one can tell whether
an individual belongs to one group or the other.
That there exists an English-speaking community of Filipinos was es-
tablished recently, quite by accident and indirectly, by Emma Santos-
Castiflo (1968). She was investigating the motivation of Filipinos when
they learned English. Contrary to expectations, she found that Filipinos
did not have &dquo;instrumental&dquo; motivation so much as &dquo;integrative&dquo; motiva-
tion when they learned English -i:e. they wanted to be identified with,
and form part of, an English-speaking group of people. However, to her
surprise she found that her subjects did not equate English with an Ameri-
can group, but rather with a Filipino group:

&dquo;Contary to predictions, positive attitudes toward Americans were

not crucial in the Filipinos desire to learn English. Rather, feelings
of satisfaction with the Philippine community were associated with
the integrative motive, and English achievement. This association
suggests that English is perceived in part as a Philippine language,
and that the integrative motive to learn English in the Philippines de-
rives from an identification with a set of Filipinos, and this particular
set is believed to constitute a Filipino English speaking community.&dquo;

This experiment has now been replicated in four cities throughout the
Philippines, and we are awaiting the results. It would be very interesting to
see whether what was true in Pasig, Rizal, where it was conducted, would
also be true in other parts of the country.
The second fact to be established is that there are &dquo;native speakers&dquo; of
SFE. By &dquo;native speakers&dquo; here is meant those who learned SFE as their
31
first language. There can be no doubt about the existence of such people,
since for example, each year in the Ateneo de Manila Grade School, we
have from eighty to one hundred boys who cannot speak any other lan-
guage besides English. I am sure this is the case also in other schools
especially in Manila and its suburbs.
Just how large this speech community is, it is difficulty to say. The CEAP
language questionnaire (1969) had 51 percent of the total number of res-
pondents saying that they spoke English at home. This survey, which was
conducted in 1969, had 44,968 respondents (35,111 from Luzon, 5,700
from the Visayas, and 4,157 from Mindanao). The 1960 Census stated
that 39.5 percent or more than 10 million Filipinos could speak English.
On the other hand, the Language Policy Survey conducted by the Lan-
guage Study Center at the Philippine Normal College (1969) reports that
out of a total number of 1,837 respondents no one learned English as his
first language. Part of the explanation for this may be that the subjects for
the Survey were randomly chosen rather than first stratified and then ran-
domly selected. After all, the concentration of native speakers of SFE ap-
pear to be from the 2.6 percent of the population with a yearly income of
10 thousand pesos or more and in the big cities of the Philippines especial-
ly Manila and its environs.
At any rate, one cannot be specific with regard to the size of the speech
community. Leonard Bloomfield (1933) cites the fact that &dquo;more than one
American Indian tribe of only a few hundred persons spoke a language
of its own&dquo;; and we here in the Philippines certainly have speech com-
munities of less than 200, e.g: Mammanua had only 151 speakers in 1960,
and Kapul had only 93.
The third fact to establish is that speakers of SFE can be understood
by other English speakers. This was shown beyond reasonable doubt by
experiments conducted at Clark Field Air Force Base in Angeles, Pam-
panga, Philippines, and at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. At
Angeles, the speakers of SFE were understood up to 99 percent when they
spoke in the formal style; while at McGill, they were understood up to

96 percent ;

Table 1: Average and Percentage Scores on Information Transfer

The second question is concerned with the norms of acceptability of

SFE. We must state that we are here dealing only with the spoken forms
32
 of SFE. To find out what these norms are, we choose four types of speak-
ers of SFE with varying commands of the language. Speaker A was a Col-
lege professor, speaker B was a senior College student, speaker C was a
freshman college student, while speaker D was a janitor. We asked these
four speakers to be scrutinized by our randomly selected subjects as they
spoke English in three styles, namely : the conversational, the semi-formal
(narrative) and formal (reading). We asked our subjects to identify which
of these speakers were truly &dquo;representative&dquo; speakers of SFE. Both speak-
ers A and B were identified by the subjects as SFE speakers, but not

speakers C and D.
The second step was to analyze the speech of C and D phonologically
and then verify the norms of acceptability of SFE by testing the peculiari-
ties of their speech with other SFE speakers. Here three experiments were
conducted. In the first experiment, we had one speaker utter sentences in
pairs: first in American English and second in SFE (formal style). In the
second experiment, we had one speaker utter sentences only in SFE (formal
style). In the third experiment we had American and Filipino speakers
utter sentences in their own styles but we did not oppose their utterances
the way we did in the first experiment. We found out that whenever SFE
pronunciation was opposed to American English pronunciation, the sub-
jects always judged the American pronunciation more correct, more per-
fect, and more acceptable. However, when we did not oppose SFE with
American pronunciation, it was judged correct, perfect, and acceptable.

4. Is There a &dquo;Standard&dquo;?

The last question asks whether there is a standard way of speaking

among speakers of SFE throughout the country. Recently, an effort was
made to answer this question. The experiments conducted in the Manila
area were replicated in eleven cities and towns, and the results compared
with those obtained in the Manila area. If there was no significant differ-
ence in the results, this would indicate that a &dquo;homogeneous&dquo; set of norms
of acceptability existed throughout the country; if, on the other hand,
significant differences were observed, then ~one could conclude that no
&dquo;standard&dquo; existed.

Experiment A: Identifying SFE Speakers

The first experiment conducted was on identifying the speakers of SFE.
Here, four speakers were presented to randomly chosen SFE speakers in
eleven cities and towns. The same speakers and tape recordings were used
as those in the Manila area: speaker A was a College professor; speaker
B, a College senior; speaker C, a college freshman; and speaker D, a jan-
itor, who had completed only three years of primary school. The SFE speak-
ers from the eleven cities and towns mentioned were then asked to evaluate
the performances of these four speakers as they spoke in three styles, name-
33
ly : the f o~mal (reading a passage from a book), the semi-formal (soliloquy
narrative), and conversational. The results of the experiment are shown
below:

The results in the Manila area differ from those outside mania as follows:
(1)} In the FORMAL STYLE:
(a) Speaker B was judged &dquo;very good&dquo; by only 35 % of the subjects
(SS) outside Manila, while he was judged such by 67 % in Manila;
(b) he was judged &dquo;good&dquo; by 55% outside Manila, but only by 3U j
in Manila.
34


(2) In the SEMI-FORMAL STYLE:

(a) Speaker A was judged &dquo;very good&dquo; by 3% outside Manila,
whereas he was not judged such in Manila;
(b) Speaker B was judged &dquo;very good&dquo; by only 22 j outside Manila,
but by 52 % as such in Manila;

(3) In the CONVERSATIONAL ~TYLE : ~

(a) Speaker A was judged &dquo;acceptable&dquo; by only 34 f outside Manila,
but by 65 % in Manila; on the other hand 55 % judged him &dquo;poor&dquo;
outside Manila, whereas 30 % judged him so in Manila.
(b) Speaker B was judged &dquo;very good&dquo; by 1I r% outside Manila, but
as such by 32% in Manila.

This list of differences, however, is not an indication of heterogeneity as

it may appear at first blush. If we group together the criteria which can
be interpreted as &dquo;acceptable performance&dquo; (i.e. acceptable, good, and
very good) and oppose these with the criterion for rejection (i.e. &dquo;poor&dquo;),
we get the following picture of percentage scores of acceptance or rejec-
tion of the four speakers:

These figures indicate that:

(1) In the FORMAL STYLE, speakers A and B were accepted both in-
side and outside Manila, whereas speakers C and D were rejected.
(2) In the SEMIFORMAL STYLE, speakers A and B were accepted
both inside and outside Manila, whereas C and D were rejected.
(3) In the CONVERSATIONAL STYLE, speaker A was accepted in
Manila, but rejected outside Manila; Speaker B was accepted both
35
 inside and outside Manila; speakers C and D were rejected both in-
side and outside Manila.
The next three experiments were conducted to find out whether the
norms of acceptability outside the Manila area were similar or identi-
cal with those in the Manila area. The same type recorded utterances
of the same speakers as those used in the Manila area were used.

Experiment I
In this experiment, the SSs were asked to judge 10 pairs of pronuncia-
1on items (isolated words and sentences). The first member of the pair
was pronounced in General American English (GAE) style, the second
in SFE. Only one speaker was used for both types of pronunciation. The
SSs were asked to use the following categories for this task: &dquo;correct -

incorrect&dquo;, &dquo;perfect -less perfect&dquo;, &dquo;more American -Filipino&dquo;p &dquo;ac-

ceptable -less acceptable&dquo;.
Experiment II
In this experiment, the SSs were asked to judge 12 items (isolated words
and sentences) pronounced by a single speaker in both GAE and SFE but
not in opposed pairs. Two of the items were purposely pronounced in an
erroneous way as a check. The SSs were asked to use the same categories
for judging acceptability as those used in experiment I.

Experiment III
In this experiment, the SSs were asked to judge the same items as those
used in experiment II, but this time the different items were pronounced
by different speakers. The SSs were asked to use the same set of categories
used in experiment I and II for the task.
The following is a comparison of the results inside andoutside thellrlani-
la areas :

1. Correctness/Acceptabilzty:

*The fractions indicate the ratio of dependence or non-dependence, i.~. 9/10 means
that in 9 out of 10 utterances, the evidence showed that decisions of correctness and
acceptability were dependent.

36
2. Perfectness/Accept ability:

3. More American FilipxnolA~ce,p~ab~lzty ~

____ .

The fact that speakers A and B were accepted with nearly the same scores
inside as well as outside the Manila area seems to indicate that, at least
in the FORMAL STYLE, there is a homogeneous way of speaking among
speakers af SFE. However, this was not the case when these speakers spoke
in the CONVERSATIONAL STYLE. Here, only speaker B was accepted
both inside and outside the Manila area.
It has been contended by some observers of English, as it is spoken in
the Philippines, that there are really several varieties of English and not
just one in the country, i.e. Ilocano English, Tagalog English, Cebuano
English, etc. We now have empirical data to support this contention, at
least when Filipinos speak SFE in the conversational style.
Likewise, the results of the three experiments on the criteria for accept-
ability conducted outside the Manila area show a near-mirror image of
those obtained in the Manila area. At least, one can say that the differences
are not significant.
From these two sets of experiments then, it seems reasonable to
conclude that there is a &dquo;standard&dquo; way of speaking SFE, at least in the
FORMAL STYLE of speaking throughout the country.

5. Materials Preparation
Having answered the questions posed in the beginning of this report on
the nature of SFE, one can say that it was reasonable to set it up as the
target language in our schools. This meant that materials could now be
constructed based on SFE (formal style).
37
 The first step in this direction was the contrastive analysis of SFE
against the two largest language groups in the Philippines Pilipino and
-

Cebuano-with a view to constructing courses for students from these two

language groups. From these contrastive analyses, syllabi were then pre-
pared, on which the individual lessons of the courses were based.
The following English courses were constructed as part of this program:

1. FUN WITH ENGLISH -Book I, Parts I and II were prepared for

Grade I. The course uses the audio-lingual method. Each lesson
starts with a brief dialogue, which is then followed by pattern drills.
The use of the phonemic transcription was aimed at giving the child
a mastery of the spoken forms of the language as well as of its
written forms. The latter were taught only after the students showed
enough control of the spoken language. The lessons were constructed
following the syllabus which resulted from the contrastive analysis
of English and Pilipino. Effort was made to make the lessons in-
teresting as well as instructive.
2. ESSENTIALS OF ENGLISH-Using the list of target elements which
resulted from the contrastive analyses of English and Filipino, a
course was prepared for Freshman College English who needed re-
medial training in the fundamentals of English. The lessons, follow-
ing the audio-lingual method, always started with a dialogue, an
explanation of the grammatical points, a set of pattern drills on
these grammatical points, and a set of pronunciation drills. The
type of English used was SFE.
3. FRESHMAN COLLEGE ENGLISH -This textbook is patterned
after No. 2 above, but was written for Cebuano students. The con-
trastive analysis of Cebuano and SFE which resulted in a list of tar-
get elements became the basis of the different lessons in this course.
4. HANDBOOK OF SECOND LANGUAGE pEACHING --This
book was written to accompany Nos. l; 2 and 3 and was primarily
designed to give the teacher information about the audio-lingual
method -its principles and techniques of second language teach-
ing. It contains chapters on how to construct pattern drills, tests,
pronunciation exercises, etc.
The last phase in this project is to test these materials against those
based on other varieties of English and see whether the Filipino student
would succeed better, using them, rather than using materials based on
other types of English. If the observations of fellow English teachers have
any validity we can expect confirmation of the theory that the way to up-
grade the teaching of English in the Philippines is by using SFE as target
language.

38
REFERENCES
CEAP Language Questionnaire. 1969. Mimeographed edition. CEAP, Sta. Mesa,
Manila.

LABOV, WILLIAM. 1963. The Social Motivation of a Sound Change. WORD 19:
273—309.

LAMBERT, WALLACE. 1961. A Study of the Roles of Attitudes and Motivation in

Second Language Learning. NDEA. Project Report, SAE — 8817. Montreal,
Canada.

LAMBERT, WALLACE, J. Havelka, and C. Crosby. 1966. The Influence of Langu-

age-Acquisition Contexts on Bilingualism. Psycholinguistics: A, Book of Readings.
N.Y.: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

LANGUAGE POLICY SURVEY OF THE PHILIPPINES. 1969. Language Study

Center: Philippines.

LLAMZON, TEODORO A. Standard Filipino English. Quezon City: Ateneo Univer-

sity Press. 1969.
. A Handbook for Second Language Teaching. Quezon City: Ateneo
University Press, 1970.
SANTOS-CASTILLO, EMA. 1968. A Study of the Roles of Aptitude, Attitude and
Motivation in Second Language Acquisition. Mimeographed. M.A. Thesis. Philip-
pine Normal College.

39