Job Discussion Forums

[Brooks]

hi,
I read today that the government in the Philippines wants English to be the medium of instruction. Does this mean that the government will need more foreign English teachers?

thanks,

Brooks

[ghost]

Forget it for the Philippines. You will never get a job teaching English there. 99 percent of Philippinos are fluent in English and Tagalog and a variety of other regional dialects.

Philippinos are friendly people, but when it comes to getting work there, and other dealings with nationals, you will not stand a chance.

From someone who has spent time in the Philippines

[Kent F. Kruhoeffer]

Dear Brooks,

Ghost is generally 'on the money' with his comments.

I lived in Manila for 2 years, surviving by freelancing with Japanese and Chinese expats and their families. I did work some part-time contracts for a small language school in Makati, the "Wall Street" of Manila, but by itself, it wouldn't have been enough $$$ to live on comfortably.

About the only thing I would dispute is the 99% fluency claim made by Ghost. That's stretching it a little. Among the university-educated class of Filipinos, he's right. Among the "common population", however, there are many, many Filipinos who can only mutter a few broken phrases in English.

Based on my experience there, my guess is that schools in the Philippines will hire from within their own ranks, so I *do* agree with Ghost's main assertion that you should probably forget about teaching there.

Unless...unless... you can arrange a job with one of the International schools (like I.S. Manila) BEFORE you arrive there. They do hire native teachers for all subjects, but they're really anal about NOT hiring people who are already in-country.

Anyway...Ba-Hala-Na ...and.. Ito ang Buhay! as they say in Tagalog.

Warm wishes,

Kent F. Kruhoeffer
Linguamir
Samara, Russia
31 January 2003

[Brooks]

well I am not interested in teaching there.
I was just curious if they will need more foreign teachers since English may become the sole medium of instruction. Taiwan will need more teachers for public schools.
I work in Tokyo.

Brooks

[Roger]

Ghost and Kent are totally right except that the 99% of English proficiency mentioned by Ghost in his post is a little exaggerated.
However, there will probably never be a chance for expats to teach there because English has been made the medium of instruction at secondary schools. This in spite of the fact - recently debated in the Filippino parliament - that local teachers are not always up to scratch as far as the English language skills go.
By the way, many Filippinos end up teaching English as part of their job as housekeeper/domestic helper. Even in China, Filippinas are being recruited to work in private households at salaries several times over wehat local maids make - but many are probably being abused as private tutors. A reason why Hong Kong has over 150'000 Filippina maids is the fact that many of them have to coach the kids of Chinese parents in English.

[Micro67]

I looked into it a while back and found some schools geared towards Koreans, but the pay was really low.

[Gringo Greg]

They are changing the focus on English because they realize that the English level of the general population is going down. ABS-CBN is now showing movies dubbed in Tagalog instead of English as was previously done. Most Filipinos don't speak English well and a good number of them just can't even speak more than a few sentences. And something that should really scare them is that a 60 year old man will speak better English than a 20 year old one. The English level is on a downward spiral.

[baby predator]

I went to an educational conference in Manila last month and was surprised by the negative assessment the Filipino educators there gave to the English skills of the general population. The Philippines has always seemed like an English speaking country to me (but then, I do come from Scotland). Turns out that the business sector is very keen to take a big slice of the global call center market, and this, plus the importance of overseas Filipinos to the local economy is driving the current interest in reinstating English as the main language of education.

I predict there will be more work for native English teachers there in coming years, but only for those with heavy-weight post-graduate qualifications in teaching. They have reassuringly high standards!

[Stephen Jones]

[arioch36]

I have worked with several teachers from the Philippines. The latest trend in henan at least, is for the schools who can't find any native English teachers to hire prople from Malayasia and the Philipines. They tend to accept any working conditions. low wages to us are great to them.

It was very clear that English is their native tongue. It is already the medium of instruction. So said they. But you couldn't tell by talking to them. They had many glaring weaknesses in their English, even though they had MA degrees, and one had taught English for years. Their english was better then most of my college students. But it seemed forced, not natural, odten spoken in kind of a stilted way. Maybe that is also cultural.

While I don't believe that you have to be from the UK, US or Oz to teach English well, I have a problem understanding the English of many of these speakers from other countries.

[Gringo Greg]

As someone married to a filipina, I have to agree that their use of English is not so natural, but it really depends on what part of the country they are from. My wife is from a part of the Philippines that speak a Spanish dialect. She makes some of the same mistakes Spanish speakers do when speaking English but her accent is very weak. Someone from the visayan region uses that same inflection and way of speaking to speak English. Many of the Filipinos going abroad are from the visayas and take that inflection adn accent with them. My ear gets hurt when I listen to visayan speakers speak English. Tagalog speakers are ok but they sometimes have a near Indian type of accent and make lots of errors.

No matter what they try to say, they are not native speakers. English is something learned at 5 or 6 years of age, not something they were born around. To me, a native speaker is someone who learned English from birth and uses it as their primary language. When visayans gather, they speak visayan, when filipinos gather, they speak tagalog, etc. etc.