What the heck. It’s been a mindf*ck week and my brain is now officially lugaw.

Anyway, I just came back from a forum sponsored by The Philippine Association for Language Teaching, Inc. this afternoon at the College of Education at UP Diliman. The forum’s entitled “Inquiring to Empowering: ELT Professionals in a Changing World.”

There were three main speakers – Prof. Edizon Fermin who talked about a cursory look at “The Current State of English,” Dr. Alan Seaman of the US Department of State, “Current Trends and Issues in Language Teaching,” and Dr. Lourdes Tayao, with her talk on “The Teacher as an Inquirer.”

Well, I mostly gave attention to Prof. Fermin’s talk since he raised some of what he viewed as the most pertinent issues in English in the Philippines and the one that concerns me most is the challenge posed by other languages such as Mandarin as the next lingua francas of international business and commerce. With that I really have to be concerned. It’s self-preservation, baby. And as a/n (soon to be) ELT professional I’ve got to look out for my own.

Dr. Seaman’s (whose name most of the people there pronounced like you would with “semen” How do you really pronounce this?) talk was the real mindf*ck of the day. He disclaimed that his talk was like Twain’s description of the Mississippi River, “A mile wide, and inch deep.” Boy was he wrong. He dropped so many language and linguistic theories at a rate of three per PowerPoint slide.

And believe me, most of these theories were written by geniuses for geniuses – things that common people like use need to pass through B and C from A to D. With them, B and C are non-existent. I hope you get the point. Bottom line is that it’s a real mindf*ck.

I really wanted to pose several questions in the forum part. Unfortunately for us, time was consumed by this lady fro the Department of Education who gave a situationer on how the Department is developing English language teaching in the country.

While it may be important, I believe that such gatherings of teachers and scholars are prime venues to push agendas for bureaucrats and the situationer pretty much sounded like a glamorized achievement report. The fact remained that most of the teachers who were in the audience seemed like they weren’t impressed by the DepEd situationer.

As I was writing, I had several questions to ask but ended up thanks to the DepEd lady. I got to ask the panel on what’s their position on the education and language policies of the country given that most government officials (since it’s election year) are more concerned on meeting BPO requirements. I was hoping that they’d get my underlying message. I was really keen on getting an answer whether the language policy is helping the English situation in the country.

Prof. Fermin’s answer satisfied my query very well. He said that what we could do is research and lobby. They’ve been doing so, unfortunately, the bicameral process wasn’t able to push forth the bill as a law. Hah! Typical legislation process – molasses slow.

Then Dr. Tayao followed it up with a comment that even if it didn’t reach the level of policy, teachers can “let it begin with [them]” (yes, quoting “Let There Be Peace on Earth) Wow. Not necessarily the answer I wanted. I also believe that it wasn’t the answer the audience would have appreciated since these were teachers who came out of their Saturday routines to be able to attend such a gathering. Doesn’t that already imply that teachers have the drive to better themselves? And saying that “let it begin with [them]” is pretty much common sense. I do think that the audience would have appreciated to hear that answers such as policy should mandate a better focus on education per se.

And the answer that would really have rocked the house is “Teachers should be provided with better venues for training and development and be compensated with salaries that encourages them to focus rather than to look for alternative ways to make ends meet” (as Prof. Fermin jokingly referred to selling longganisa in an earlier quip. Hehehe).

Not to be disrespectful to Dr. Tayao, her points really valid. An educator should have the drive to improve onself!

Good grief, this is a long post recounting a good three hours of my day. I just really had to document this so that I could free my mind off some information for meantime.

Check out these other posts:

1. A new blog for learning English language and literature
2. The English Studies Forum
3. Language studies and blogging
4. Will blogging for literacy work in the Philippine context?
5. On English, prescriptivism, Filipinos, and the Internet