Beauty queen bad English an eye-opener for RP education Gullas

MANILA, Philippines – A lawmaker has filed a bill seeking to reinstate English as the medium of instruction in all school levels after a contestant spoke in fractured English during a beauty pageant aired on television.

The bill has already been endorsed by 207 of the 238 members of the House of the Representatives.

Cebu Rep. Eduardo Gullas, an educator whose family owns one of the oldest schools in his province, was annoyed by the 17-year-old beauty queen’s reply during the pageant’s question-and-answer portion.

“Her sensational failure to answer a simple question in straight English betrays the fading competence of a growing number of young Filipinos in the world’s lingua franca,” he said.

“The truth is, if (the contestant) had been Chinese, Japanese, Spanish or French, nobody would have cared about her awkward English. People would have totally ignored it. “They would have excused her right away. But she is Filipino, and English is our highly favored second language. So people expected more from her.”

Gullas said he hopes that it is not yet too late for the beauty queen to improve her English before the Miss World pageant in November. “She will recover quickly, no doubt about that,” he said. “We wish her good luck.”

In the question-and-answer portion in the March 8 pageant, a female judge asked the contestant what role her family had played in her participation in the contest.

She answered: “Well, my family’s role for me is so important because there was the, they’re... they was the one whose very, ha-ha; oh I’m so sorry.

“Ah my family, my family, oh my God, I’m, okay. I’m so sorry; I, I told you that I’m so confident; ah wait, ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha, uhm, sorry guys because this was really my first pageant ever.

“Because I’m only 17 years old, and I did not expect that I came from, I came from the one of the top 10; uhm, so, but I said that my family is the most important persons in my life. Thank you.”

A video clip of that scene has been placed on YouTube in the Internet.

Meanwhile, the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority under former Iloilo congressman Augusto Syjuco has offered to help future beauty contestants express themselves better in English through a free, 120-hour crash course.

No corrections

A schoolbook critic has disclosed that a publisher of a series of English and Science textbooks used in over 200 private schools still had not made corrections on the numerous grammatical and conceptual errors he found more than two years ago.

Antonio Calipjo-Go, academic supervisor of a private school in Quezon City, said that a review he made on about 12 books in the “Simply Science in the Next Century” and the “Harnessing English Arts Today” elementary book series – both published by Phoenix Publishing House Inc. – showed that none were revised to remove the numerous errors he had exposed in a paid advertisement he placed in The STAR in June 2005.

“The errors I exposed by means of my June 22, 2005 paid ad, by and large, remain in these books, as proven by the re-evaluation I conducted on nine new textbooks (2007 edition) I bought last Oct. 23, 2007,” Go said in a position paper sent to The STAR.

Go said that the failure of Phoenix Publishing House to make the revisions in the 2007 edition manifested its lack of concern about the quality of their textbooks being read by young children in private elementary schools.

“The Grade 2 ‘Simply Science’ book, for instance, has not been subjected to any kind of correction. This 252-page alleged instructional material still retains the 347 errors I saw therein three years ago in November 2004,” he pointed out.

Go also cited the case of the “Simply Science in the Next Century” book for Grade 3, which was already declared as “poor” in quality by the University of the Philippines’ National Institute for Science and Mathematics Education Development (UP-NISMED). He said this did not get the necessary revisions in the 2007 edition.

“Of the six Science books, only the Grade 3 book had been revised, after it was declared ‘poor’ by the UP-NISMED. Phoenix hired a new editor, yet the revised edition still contains many errors,” Go said.

“Is insulin ‘a hormone that allows glucose to move from the blood to the cells during photosynthesis’? Is mummification ‘a drying process that forms fossils’? These two unforgivable errors had been pointed out in my ad of June 2005. Why are they still in the Grade 6 book? Are these not errors? Simply scientific! Simply stupid!” Go exclaimed. – Rainier Allan Ronda