ENGLISH IS NO LONGER A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

ABEGAIL PADILLA-INDUCIL

“This is an English class… please speak in English”… requested by an English secondary teacher for 30 years and still begging her students to practice more in English. Well what really is the impact in making this a not so fear and difficult subject?

In an opinion article published by Philippine Star on September 2019, Danton Remoto wrote about the fear of English among Filipinos despite being the third-largest Englishspeaking country in the world. We joke about how we only speak straight English when we’re drunk; or how it makes our nose bleed. We make fun of thick accents and lack of sophistication with pronouncing English words; and switch to Tagalog when faced with a native speaker. Ultimately, he raised the following question: “How can we banish this fear of English?”

As a teacher of 33 years, Remoto champions the teaching of World Englishes. I admire Remoto's philosophy in SLT. It's a philosophy that celebrates diversity and embraces English in all its varieties. I am specifically smitten by this passage: "To learn a language is to know its culture", followed by citations of his learners, in all the glory of their diverse racial backgrounds, using English to describe their own cultural realities. It made me remember a passage from Manuel Arguilla's How My Brother Leon Brough Home a Wife; "She was fragrant like a morning when papayas are in bloom." The passage was not simply an example of the use of local color in literature, but also a reflection of young Baldo's reality: As a boy who has only been in the provincial farms his entire life, he could only describe his brother wife's in the context he's familiar with - the smell of fresh papayas.

I was also fascinated with Remoto's concept of not only using a language, but simultaneously owning it and making it your own. This can be seen in his practice of encouraging students to use THEIR English according to their own linguistic backgrounds, regardless if its "inflected with the inner rhythms of their native languages." I have a reason to believe that Remoto's students are not intimidated with the target language and are more receptive to learning because of the absence of the affective filter.

He caps off the article with a quotation from Gemino Abad, a UP professor and poet: “English is no longer a foreign language. It’s already ours, for we have already colonized it.”

-oOoThe author is Teacher I at Mapaniqui Elementary School, Candaba North District, Pampanga