Teachers to undergo skills upgrading in learning, teaching Spanish

MANILA, Philippines - Some 113 public high school teachers will undergo Spanish learning and training programs at the Instituto Cervantes in Manila as the Department of Education (DepEd) aggressively pursues their Special Program in Foreign Language (SPFL).

Of the 113, 95 are teachers from 14 regions who have already started teaching Spanish in selected public high schools and will be upgrading their skills in speaking Spanish as well as teaching it to their students, while 18 are beginners from three regions who were not able to send teachers for the DepEd’s SPFL-Spanish program in school year 2009-2010.

Education Secretary Br. Armin Luistro, FSC said the training is part of DepEd’s continuing thrust to equip its teaching force with additional knowledge to impart to their students, such as a third language.

“I think it is important to teach one of the world’s more widely-spoken languages to our students as part of their preparation for the global arena,” Luistro said.

The summer program on Spanish education will run from April 16 to May 28 at the Instituto Cervantes, Manila at T.M. Kalaw Street in Ermita, Manila.

DepEd is implementing the program with support from the Spanish Ministry of Education, Instituto Cervantes and the Spanish Agency for International Cooperation for Development (AECID).

The three new expansion schools for the Spanish language program are from three divisions namely Bacolod-Iloilo, Cebu, and Davao.

The SPFL aims to develop students’ skills in listening, reading, writing, speaking and viewing as fundamental to acquiring communicative competence in a second foreign language. In SY 2009-2010, the SPFL was piloted in selected public secondary schools with Spanish, French and Japanese. In SY 2010-2011, German was added to the list of foreign languages offered. 

According to DepEd, globalization has prompted countries to level up their competitive edge in job opportunities by making its citizens learn some of the world’s most widely-used languages such as Spanish.

SPFL is implemented in public high schools whose students have demonstrated competence in English and are capable of learning another foreign language.