EDUCATION SYSTEM AND ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING IN THE PHILIPPINES: IMPLICATIONS FOR INDONESIAN EFL LEARNING

The Philippines is held as one of the largest English-speaking countries worldwide with most of its people possessing at least some degree of fluency in the target language. The prestige of the English language in this country has attracted the attention of many foreign students including Indonesian. In this paper, we aimed to discuss the education system and the English language teaching (ELT) in the Philippines so that practical insights can be gained to reflect on Indonesian EFL learning. To this end, we first described how the Philippine education system looks like and how the English language is taught in schools from elementary to tertiary level. We then explored some prevailing challenges surrounding the ELT, and established links relating the benefits of learning English in this country to Indonesian EFL context. Drawing on qualitative approach, we realized our research objectives by carefully selecting sources and data through critical review of articles from journals, books, websites, and other reliable sources retrieved online. Ultimately, we conducted this inquiry to find out answers so that some lessons learned can be adopted to make ELT in Indonesia better and more resilient since Indonesia remains left behind in the spectrum of English literacy

WHAT IS SO SCARY ABOUT LEARNING ENGLISH? INVESTIGATING LANGUAGE ANXIETY AMONG FILIPINO COLLEGE STUDENTS

Learning English as a foreign/second language is never a straightforward process. Several constraints may come along the way that tend to hinder students’ learning. Studies have shown that the successes and failures of L2 learners in an English language classroom are dependent upon various psychological and social factors including anxiety. This study examined the English language learning anxiety of Filipino college students. The Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety survey adapted from Horwitz, Horwitz and Cope (1986) was administered to a group of 150 students randomly selected from 5 programs at a private university in the Philippines to identify students’ anxiety level in terms of fear of negative evaluation, communication apprehension, fear of test, and anxiety of English class and to determine which factor is most probable to cause anxiety among them.. The results indicated that the students expressed different levels of anxiety among the four factors as majority provided answers ranging from neutral to strongly agree. However, it was discovered that fear of negative evaluation and communication apprehension were the most probable to cause anxiety among them. The study offers practical implications as to how L2 teachers can help students overcome their English anxiety and thus be successful in the learning of the target language

Experiencing problems in data collection by undergraduate EFL students as novice researchers

Data collection is a research process determining the validity and reliability of a study, and novice researchers have been found to experience many problems in this process. However, little study addressed the problem in data collection among these researchers. Therefore, this study was conducted to uncover problems experienced by English as a Foreign Language (EFL) undergraduate students without any previous experience in data collection. Seventeen undergraduate EFL students were assigned to collect data using a two-item questionnaire, which involved communicating with research participants before sending the questionnaire to the participants. After the data collection, they were requested to write a brief report explaining their communication with the participants and the problems they experienced. The reports written by the students were treated as the data for this research and were subjected to qualitative analysis to understand the problems they faced in the data collection. The results show that students experienced some problems in collecting the data, i.e., lack of responses, late responses, a negative response, and uncompleted questionnaires. The results of the study suggest that potential problems in data collection should be introduced to undergraduate EFL students before they conduct their undergraduate research

No child left behind, literacy challenges ahead: a focus on the Philippines

The Sustainable Development Goal 4 has commenced a global mandate to provide equitable access to quality education for everyone. In the Philippines, SDG 4 inaugurates the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Policy. This brief argues that while the NCLB has ensured equal access to quality literacy education, it poses socioeconomic-based challenges, declining rate of parental involvement in their children’s schooling, overemphasis on standardized tests, and the lack of community involvement towards literacy programs. The Holistic Literacy Enhancement Program (HLEP) is proposed in this paper to help address these challenges to NCLB. HLEP presents policy implications that could assist the NCLB in more efficient and effective implementation: equitable resource allocation, parental and community engagement, and culturally and linguistically relevant assessment tools

AUGMENTING SENIOR SECONDARY ESL LEARNERS’ READING SKILLS THROUGH EXPLICIT INSTRUCTION OF METACOGNITIVE STRATEGIES

Reading and comprehending a text or selection in a language that is different from one’s native tongue can be a daunting task to many English as a Second Language (ESL) learners due to several reasons. Hence, teachers’ instructional strategies play a pivotal role in developing students’ reading skills. This study used a quasi-experimental design to discover the effects of using explicit or direct teaching of metacognitive strategies on the reading skills of students—comprehension skills and vocabulary. Forty grade 11 ESL students from a Chinese–Filipino school in Manila were selected through convenience sampling to be participants of the study. The performance of the two groups in comprehension and vocabulary was compared through pre-test and post-test. Using two-tailed t-test of dependent means, the significant difference between students’ performance in the reading comprehension test and the vocabulary test after the intervention was determined. Based on the results, there is no question that one’s comprehension and vocabulary size could be improved using explicit teaching of metacognitive strategies. The study has practical implications to the teaching of reading among ESL learners. Recommendations for future research are also provided in this paper