Breakfast Table: Adrian Cristobal
THE first difficulty about the SWS survey "National Proficiency in English" – said to be declining over the past 12 years – is the measure of "proficiency." There are a great number of people, from politicians to prelates, business executives to journalists, who speak and write English but who, by a certain measure, can hardly be called proficient. They do get by with their English, at least in bamboozling people who have less English, but they’re not quite in their element when faced with their counterparts in the United Kingdom and the United States. This is probably one reason we are so poor in negotiating for our own interests in trade and diplomacy.
After less than a century of "immersion," English hasn’t ceased to be a foreign language for Filipinos, although we insist on calling it a second language. If there’s any doubt, just listen to political and economic debates: Although conducted in the "common language" of English, the misunderstandings, involuntary and deliberate, are appalling, to say the least.
What often passes for proficiency even in academic and journalistic circles is pompous rhetoric, inept diction, mixed metaphors, and circumlocutions masquerading as eloquence and deep thought. And yet we are conducting the debate on constitutional change in English despite the fact that the "national proficiency" in the language has declined!
All things considered, however, it’s heartening to note that DECS officer-in-charge Fe Hidalgo is not alarmed at the survey’s discovery of the decline in English proficiency.
It’s easy, to begin with, to name highly successful and wealthy entrepreneurs whose proficiency in English has not declined because it has not risen in the first place. English is translated for them by proficient hired hands. And English-speakers who want their business speak to them in the simplest English they can muster. There’s something amiss here if English is touted as the language of success.
This is no put down of the language I write in. But it will be more fruitful to speak of the decline in general education rather than of the decline in English proficiency.
The trouble probably lies in the "Englishing" political "class."
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