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GOODLUCK! (pakopya daw ana si Jayk)

The Coloniality of Linguistic Entrepreneurship (Group 1)

20 pages down to 3 (for reference)

Abstract

● Peter De Costa, Joseph Park and Lionel Wee (2016) published a conceptual
paper on language learning as linguistic entrepreneurship. This paper seeks to
expand the idea of linguistic entrepreneurship along the lines of coloniality.
According to de Costa, Park and Wee (2016), linguistic entrepreneurship refers
to the changing nature of language learning today that places a moral desire to
learn a language on the individual learner. In this paper, the argument pushes the
definition of linguistic entrepreneurship further by locating it centrally within
conditions of coloniality. This paper specifically aims to show the durability of the
coloniality of language learning and education today.

● TUPAS: THE COLONIALITY OF LINGUISTIC UNITAS draws on the complex

and multilayered nature of an English Language Teaching (ELT) project funded
by the United States as part of its anti-terrorism campaign in Mindanao.

The neoliberal learner in conditions of coloniality Neoliberal

● Neoliberal education and language learning in the Philippines are historically

mediated by 20th century (neo)colonialism. Therefore, there is a need to look at
the coloniality of education and language learning, but this time mediated by the
ethical logics of neoliberalism.

● Linguistic entrepreneurship is mobilized in conditions of coloniality, and nuances,

even reconfigures, but does not override the coloniality of conditions and
experiences of language learning, a point about language learning which has
been examined extensively by scholars in the past. According to Hsu (2015),
language learning in the Philippines is "an element of overseas colonial rule",
and curricular revisions cannot happen if colonial content, dispositions and
attitudes are "invisibilized" (Hsu 2015: 125). Throughout direct American colonial
rule in the Philippines, the English language was imposed as the sole medium of
instruction. After nominal independence in 1946, the Philippines began to
implement Mother Tongue-based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE), but the law
is a "castrated" version. The Philippines remains "in the grip of English" seventy
 years after its independence from the United States, and the promotion and
learning of neoliberal English "evidences coloniality" (Hsu 2015: 125).

The coloniality of language learning: an example Between

● JEEP was part of the Growth with Equity in Mindanao (GEM) Program funded by
the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to promote
peace and development in Mindanao. The region of Muslim Mindanao is the
traditional homeland of Muslim Filipinos, but has been disempowered since the
onset of Spanish colonization. In 1989, an Autonomous Region of Muslim
Mindanao (ARMM) was created to address years of neglect and historical
injustices suered by Muslim Filipinos.

● JEEP was implemented at the time the United States was highly involved in the
Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), with the explicit motivation of helping Filipino
university students improve their proficiency in English in order to help uplift the
economic conditions of Mindanao. The US military presence in the country,
largely concentrated in the Mindanao region, intensified again after the 9/11
attack when it provided high-technology intelligence and expertise support to the
Philippine government as it pursued insurgent forces in the area. The rhetoric
surrounding the justification for JEEP shows an interesting overlaying of
entrepreneurial and explicitly market driven agenda.

● The US is investing in you to help you get jobs by learning English, so be the
best you can be.

● The framing of JEEP as an essentially neoliberal linguistic entrepreneurial

enterprise masks the broader historical and political conditions which produce it,
such as the belief that "colonial English" would "be the great civilizer" in
Mindanao and Sulu.

● In the JEEP classroom, students are assigned individual cubicles with computers
and are expected to work alone most of the time. They use a language learning
software manufactured and designed in the United States and are tested using
an assessment rubric which aims towards American native speaker-level
proficiency.

● Try to repeat the sentence again, listen to your own recording, and repeat it again
until it becomes pleasing to hear. That's why we have recording and repeating
basically for speaking purposes and for the retain [sic] of information.
● The mode of English language learning in the JEEP classrooms is Recursive
Hierarchical Recognition (RHR), which is a cognitive, brain-based approach to
English language learning that triggers and deploys "procedural memory" which
facilitates learning even without conscious understanding. The embodied nature
of linguistic skills means that it is simply not possible to evaluate learned
language abilities while bracketing out the speaker and her sociolinguistic
histories. The learners in the JEEP project embody linguistic skills which are
imbricated in conditions of coloniality. The JEEP project cannot be divorced from
the grander agenda of legitimizing the continuing US military presence in
Mindanao.

● The infrastructures of teaching and learning in JEEP classrooms operate under

similar conditions as those in American colonial education, and are characterized
by the use of computer, self-study, repetition and automaticity as modes of
language learning, and the imposition of an English-Only policy. The privilege of
"native speaker" norms, the use of monolingualist methods of teaching, and the
harnessing of individualist dispositions and skilled bodies in language learning
and education are trajectories of coloniality in the Philippines.

● Based on the discussion in the preceding sections of the paper, linguistic

entrepreneurship is pursued from a position of relative priv ilege. Middle-class
Koreans study abroad to "get ahead" and speak like a "native speaker" to
maximize one's value as human capital.

● Filipino English language learners are positioned differently from other English
language learners in the Philippines, as exemplified by discourses emanating
from the JEEP project and the practices associated with it. Filipinos learn English
to be globally competitive, but their participation in the new economy is largely
pursued from a position of relative weakness, conditioned by colonially-shaped
structures and conditions of relations between the United States and the
Philippines.

● While the paper has mapped out the coloniality of neoliberal linguistic
entrepreneurship in the Philippines, coloniality remains a pervasive form of
domination in the rest of the world as well.

● Filipinos learning English, or at least those who are unable to speak Standard
English, are "in the grip of English" and are therefore unable to transform their
current relationship with the English language.
History, language planners, and strategies of forgetting
The problem of consciousness in the Philippines (Group 2)
25 to 5 pages

● The same summative paper of Sibayan and Gonzalez also demonstrates that
English continues to be dominant in the Philippines, because English is a social
stratifier, and because the Filipino elite continue to hold on to their power partly
through English. In the essay, two prominent scholars reveal how English
proficiency is intricately tied to structures of power relations in the Philippines.
They show that linguistic independence did not really translate to economic and
cultural liberation. This paper argues that the seemingly contradictory remarks
about the end of linguistic imperialism in the Philippines and the continuing
cultural, economic, and military dependence of the country on the United States
are not contradictory at all.

● The discourses and ideologies in English language teaching in the world today
are interconnected with the cultural constructs of colonialism. This paper
explores the interconnectedness between past and present ideas and their
contexts through the issue of forgetting in the Philippines. In this paper, we will
focus on discursive strategies used by language planning practitioners in the
Philippines to justify and reaffirm historical assumptions about language. We will
also discuss some courses of action that can be taken in response. The issue of
forgetting and remembering is not new, and scholars have explored different
configurations of forgetting and remembering emerging from different historical
directions, ideologies and sociopolitical needs. Our case against forgetting is
worked through a web of issues pertaining to particular historical experiences of
Filipinos. This paper analyzes certain ideological/discursive tendencies in English
language work in the Philippines before and after 'independence' in 1946. It
argues that many ideologies and structures of relations remain fundamentally the
same. Critical appraisals of language planners have often failed to look into the
historical assumptions of much of language planning in the world. Many Filipino
scholars have embarked on a massive (re)visioning of the country's past, but this
has not changed in a substantial way how Filipinos define themselves vis-à-vis
their past, present and future. This problem of consciousness is historically
deeply rooted in the socioeconomic relations among Filipinos of different classes.
● Official history in the Philippines is built upon the forgetting of the war that
brought the nation-state into being. Scholars have used three major discursive
maneuvers of forgetting. The Philippine-American War of 1898 - 1901 began
when the United States was waging a fierce battle against Spain in Cuba. The
United States wanted to gain control over the Philippines to flex its imperialist
arms beyond its own shores.

● The Philippine-American War was a brutal conflict that became the essential
starting point for US-Philippine relations in modern times. Nevertheless, the
'official' version of Philippine history does not mention the war, and only recently
has a documentary film entitled Memories of a Forgotten War been made.

● Gonzalez glosses over the war in his significant work on the history of the
language issue in the Philippines and demonstrates the fundamental problem of
historical amnesia.

● Gonzalez (26), despite the "new order of things", says that the system of primary
education made English more accessible to the less affluent Filipino than it ever
was. Earlier works on the national language issue in the Philippines offer
resonances of imperial forgetting. Frei (1949, 1950) and Fullante (1983) both
ignore the war, while Fullante's discursive appraisal of the American colonization
of the Philippines constructs a time when the Americans simply "took over the
Philippine government". On US colonial rule: Forget the pain by ignoring the
immeasurable advantages in teaching and learning English in school. This is
essentially the gist of the next strategy of forgetting. Sibayan (1991) gives a
personal account of American colonial education in the Philippines, noting that
children were punished for speaking in the vernacular and were taught literary
masterpieces by American and British writers. The immersion of children in
English was practically forced on them, and they were subject to massive
language indoctrination campaigns. This caused a mixture of cultural and
psychological effects upon the Filipino child.

● After having exonerated ( absolve (someone) from blame for a fault or

wrongdoing} imperialism from the learning of English, he proceeds to explain why
fear and anger could be forgotten as mere painful challenges for a better future.

● The third casualty of imperial amnesia is 'a deep sense of nationalism'. Filipino
language planners and scholars are constantly reminded that nationalism is not
equated with language, and that the promotion of English does not make one an
anti-nationalist. There is much talk of a compromise between pragmatism and
 nationalism, but we do not know what nationalism means. This political and
ideological posturing is deeply aligned with colonial history's disregard of
intermittent, yet sometimes explosive, resistance by Filipinos against the US
colonial and neocolonial rule. In the early years of colonial rule, many Filipinos
continued to fight the colonizers through guerrilla warfare. Yet, popular education
and political co-optation would help perpetuate a myth about the Filipino 'bandits'
who 'deserved' the punishment of death or incarceration upon capture. Scholars
move to isolate 'nationalism' from its historical rootedness, and to discursively
berate it. They claim that those who favor the maintenance of English as the
medium of instruction are the more thoughtful sectors of our people, and that
'nationalism' and 'development' just cannot go together.

● Language planning in the Philippines has been faced with a dilemma of choice
between pragmatism and nationalism for more than three decades, but imperial
forgetting has made this choice look as if it is the only viable option available, and
thus prevented the formation of a broader range of choices. Imperial amnesia
has helped create and perpetuate the standard analysis of the language problem
in the Philippines, which allocates English to mathematics and the natural
sciences and Filipino to all other courses, especially the social sciences. The
standard analysis of the Philippine language question is that English describes
the Philippine social structure as produced and sustained by intersecting
structures of unequal relations. Survey data produces the same results, and
these results become powerful 'objective' indicators used by language planners,
language scholars, and educators. Gonzalez's posturing ignores the
sociohistorical constructedness of people's choices, and this results in language
planning and educational policies which are historically unsympathetic.
Alternative visions of language, education, and society are rarely taken up by
many Filipinos.

● The way we think about our past is the root of all language-related problems in
society. If we can convince everyone that there are problems of thought and
truth, problems of action and change in society will gradually fade away. The
structures of inequality across which imperial amnesia is deployed, reproduced
and appropriated are imbued with structural power. This signifies two things: first,
that discursive strategies of forgetting are imbricated in broad structures of
(unequal) relations that are economic, social, and political in origin. In our case,
the discursive strategies of forgetting are social practices of forgetting constituted
within the historical matrix of socioeconomic contradictions, power struggle and
domination in the Philippines. Changing such strategies does not necessarily
lead to a change in social structures and relations. Language planning practices
 and other language-related ideologies are dimensions of social action, and
transforming these discursive practices entails a transformation of social
relations. This relationship between thought and action, between discursive
strategies and social relations, is a problematizing space where we continually
define and refine our roles as active practitioners.

● The relation between consciousness/discourse and social action complicates this

question. On the one hand, a counter-consciousness in the form of remembering
may enable us to envision a democratic struggle towards a more equitable
Philippine society through a redistribution of languages. While practices of
forgetting help reproduce social inequities, any sociolinguistic reconfiguration of
Philippine society through 'a duty to remember' also cannot be done in isolation
from all other facets of Philippine society.

● In a piece of pioneering educational research, Canieso-Doronilla (1989)

discovers that Filipino pupils have very weak affinity with being Filipino.

● Canieso-Doronilla's findings show that 94 percent of Filipino respondents focus

on options other than Filipino, particularly the United States, and that Filipino
students have little knowledge of history. The refusal of the majority of the
population and especially dominant groups within the society to confront
questions of neocolonial domination and to gain lessons from the country's
historical experiences will most certainly be reflected in the nature and content of
national identity formation especially through the schools. Canieso-Doronilla's
(1998) other work provides us with another way to address the theoretical
nuances of the relation between discourses and social action, between
resistance and unfreedom, by working with local communities in addressing their
problems through education. The educational problem in the Philippines is the
wide gap between the structure and content of education and the social realities
of the majority of the people. This is because the high basic literacy rate does not
assume abilities to think critically and abstractly. Research, surveys, interviews
and consultations may yield educational curricula that are relevant to the
sociopolitical and economic affairs of the communities. Such curricula integrate
comprehensive education with over-all community development, and use the
learners' first language at the basic literacy level. Pilot projects of comprehensive
education and community development have produced striking results, with 79%
of Grade One pupils being able to read and write. The colonial context distorted
the Filipino education system, but with many successful local initiatives in
education and community development, a new, context-specific but broader view
of literacy has been adopted. This view encompasses communication skills,
 problem solving and critical thinking, sustainable use of resources/productivity,
and expanding one's world vision.

● Following Canieso-Doronilla, we can assert that language policy-making and

second language education are practices and instruments of social policy, and
that the problem of consciousness in our work is multifaceted: it is about content,
about changing such content, and about initiating change amidst conditions of
unfreedom.

Entanglements of colonialism, social class, and Unequal

Englishes (Group 3)
14 to 5 ages

Abstract

● The return of class to sociolinguistic analysis has come with ideological erasures,
such as the disappearance of colonialism and coloniality. This paper aims to
tackle the erasure of class in intellectual movements and introduce the concept
of colonially induced Unequal Englishes.

INTRODUCTION

● Social class is formed by material factors such as income, wealth, purchasing

power, educational attainment, social memberships, and other measurable social
factors. It has been sidelined or ignored by the "cultural turn" in the study of
society.

● This paper argues that the restoration of class as a core aspect of sociolinguistic
analysis has also come with its own ideological erasures: the disappearance of
"colonialism and its replicants" (or coloniality).

● Colonial conditions, practices, and ideologies remain deeply rooted in the way
local people live and govern their lives today. This is what some refer to as the
coloniality of life today.

● To support this paper's argument that class and colonialism are inextricably
linked, the literature on the pluralization of English in the Philippines will be used.
 This literature shows how the language has been involved in the formation of
Philippine elites and colonially induced social class structure.

● I discuss the general erasure of class in sociolinguistics and applied linguistics,

and how this involves the decoupling of class and colonialism in research on the
politics of Englishes in the Philippines. I introduce the concept of colonially
induced Unequal Englishes.

THE ERASURE OF SOCIAL CLASS

● In recent years, scholars have observed a generalized disengagement from and

erasure of class in applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and related fields. This
paper argues that social class dimensions of Englishes are inextricably linked
with the enduring structures and ideologies of colonialism. The marginalization of
social class in language studies extends to other areas such as bi/multilingual
research, literacy research, second language acquisition and learning, and
TESOL and language education, as well as other related fields. The sidestepping
of class is part of a general intellectual trend in academia that privileges culture
over structure and political economy.

● The focus on culture has allowed scholars since the 1980s to see the world as
constitutive of people engaged in perpetual mobilities, liquidness, and identity
border crossings, and to inbetweeness of cultural identities and experiences,
agency and resistance of the erstwhile subjugated people, and language use.

● Recent calls to recentre class in the analysis of the social life of language have
argued that class is obstinately durable within the political economy of language,
perpetuating poverty, economic inequality, and social class divisions. The
dynamics of globalization drive contemporary restructurations of relations
between individuals, the state, and intrastate and interstate political and
economic institutions, with the distribution of capital and the social mechanisms
through which one can access it mediating and being mediated by social class.

In the following section, I show how erasure of social class comes into play in the study
of English in the Philippines.

THE ERASURE OF SOCIAL CLASS AND COLONIALITY IN THE STUDY OF

ENGLISH IN THE PHILIPPINES
 ● Renato Constantino's (1970) critical essay on the miseducation of the Filipino
highlights how the colonial education system skewed towards the desirability of
learning English and Standard American English more specifically, and how this
rendered the majority of Filipinos "inarticulate" in any kind of English or any
language.

● The United States occupied the Philippines through the bloody

PhilippineAmerican War of 1899 - 1902 and implemented its colonizing strategy
of benevolent assimilation by co opting the Spanish Speaking caciques and
introducing free basic education to all, but mainly through English as medium of
instruction. The Filipino caciques, wealthy and educated during the latter
decades of Spanish rule, became more powerful during American colonialism, as
they gained access to the American market and political power.

● When the Philippines became independent from the United States in 1946, the
caciques dominated the national and local political leadership and kept English
as the primary language of education. They were also opposed to the
Tagalogbased national language called "Pilipino" as a medium of instruction.

● Due to the universalization of basic education, new social groups were created,
including the urban bourgeois and pettybourgeois group. They maintained that
English was the key to global competitiveness. By the mid1980s, one million
Filipinos had gone overseas for work and settlement, mainly as seafarers and
domestic workers. Many among this group were highly educated and proficient in
the English language, thus helping perpetuate the dominant place of English in
society and education.

● The nationalist critique of English in the Philippines focused on the role of

English, socially stratified Englishes, and colonial education as enablers of
"benevolent assimilation," in perpetuating caciquedominated class relations in
the country. However, alternative/reactionary postcolonial criticism oversimplified
this thesis by glossing over the central role of colonialism.

Research on the pluralization of English in the Philippines

● Constantino's (1970) essay and Llamzon's (1969) book length work are both
making critical commentaries on English and education at the time, except that
they are doing so through radically different lenses. Llamzon provides empirical
evidence for pluralized English in the Philippines, but does not make any critical
comment on why there is such an educated local variety of English.
 ● Llamzon provides empirical evidence for the localization and pluralization of
English in the Philippines, while Constantino problematizes the emergence of an
"educated" variety of English in the Philippines as this is proof that the imposition
of the English language has divided Philippine society along class lines. Linguists
and sociologists of language have described a hierarchy of Philippine Englishes,
with standard, "educated" Philippine English spoken by an elite few, and other
Philippine Englishes spoken by those occupying the "outer" and "peripheral"
social classes.

● The ideological lineaments engendered by Llamzon's work have taken on a

unique intellectual character in similar studies which flourished thereafter, leading
Tay (1991) to suggest that the Philippines has perhaps produced the most
comprehensive research on an indigenized variety of English in Southeast Asia.
Under the premise of educated phonological, syntactic, semantic, and rhetorical
innovations by Filipino speakers of English, scholars have argued for the
legitimacy of Philippine English, as well as Filipinos' claim to ownership over their
own use of English.

● The embeddedness of Philippine English in enduring colonial structures of

relations was dismissed as a thing of the past, but the neocolonial relations that
shaped English language use today are preserved or sustained "on new
grounds".

Coloniality and class in Unequal Englishes

● Call centres in the Philippines are part of the globalized outsourced movement,
where companies domiciled in the US, the UK, and Continental Europe put up
call centres for cheaper costs of doing business while maintaining, if not
improving, the quality of business provision and customer service. The standard
economic view of this phenomenon claims that it benefits both (USbased)
corporate interests as well as countries where business services relocate, but
this simplistic understanding is misplaced on economic grounds and ideological
in its universalization of corporate interests.

● Outsourced call centre work involves the use of English by workers who
generally use the language at least as a second or third language. This positions
the Filipino call centre workers in ways which implicate local relations of power
and colonial politics of capital accumulation.
 ● Filipino call centre workers come from relatively good universities or English
speaking families, and are thus locked into classshaped unequal relations
between most other young Filipino graduates whose proficiency in English shuts
them out of wellpaying jobs in the country. The Philippine English of call centre
workers is the exclusive, elite variety, implicated in unequal globally shaped local
structures of social relations, as it facilitates the search for capital and other
sources of savings through cheap(er) labour, but perpetuates the privileged
status of the welleducated Filipino workers in Philippine society.

● Philippine English speaking call centre workers are bound up with local colonially
induced classbased relations, and call centre work in the Philippines perpetuates
rather than transforms colonially induced class relations.

● The politics of English in call centres in the Philippines is inextricably linked with
the politics and ideological infrastructures of education, which remain
fundamentally centred on the desire for and promise of English, and the training
of Filipino youth as workers of the world.

● Several US funded projects have proliferated across the Philippines, especially

among Mindanao's sizable Filipino Muslim population, aimed at (re)introducing
native speakerbased English language proficiency and Englishonly training
laboratories into formal tertiary curricula. However, these initiatives sustain the
stratifying, classinduced work of education. Four decades after Constantino's
nationalist critique of the coloniality of English and education in the Philippines,
the central role of such coloniality in shaping everyday Filipino life remains
fundamentally true.

CONCLUSION

● Call centres in the Philippines serve as new frontiers of global capitalism where
cheap labour is extracted from Filipino workers who speak the "educated" variety
of Philippine English. In the process, call centres become new contexts for
(re)configuring structures of social relations which are embedded in the enduring
and resilient configurations of coloniality.

● The globalization and pluralization of English have entangled political economy,

structure, and social class in language, and this must be acknowledged in order
to understand how language use today continues to make, unmake, and remake
social relations and ideologies.
The New Challenge Of The Mother Tongues: The Future Of
Philippine Postcolonial Language Politics (Group 4)
14 to 4-5 pages

Abstract

● In postcolonial language politics, the fight has largely been between a foreign
(read: colonial) language and a dominant local language(s). In recent years,
however, the mother tongues have posed a challenge to the ideological structure
of the debates, and mother tongue-based education has reconfigured the terms
of engagement in Philippine postcolonial language politics.

Introduction

● In the Philippines, postcolonial language politics has often been about how to
de-center colonial/imperial languages from social life or how to slowly
(re)introduce the mother tongues into the centers of power in society. This paper
will explore the role of mother tongues in Philippine postcolonial language
politics.

Mother Tongue Instruction Around The World

● However, this seemingly unproblematic fact about mother tongues becomes a

highly politicized argument if it is located in specific sociopolitical contexts, such
as the ex-British colonies where mother tongue schooling was a historical
by-product of separate and unequal development.

● According to Benson, mother tongues have served as representations of new

political ideologies in many societies, including Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam and
Indonesia.

● While mother tongue instruction has proven to be pedagogically sound, its

valuing differs across communities and societies. It is enmeshed in many other
social issues, including postcolonial language politics.

Mother Tongue Instruction In The Philippines

 ● Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MLE) was institutionalized on July
14, 2009 and has supplanted the country's bilingual education policy. It pushes
for the mother tongues of students as media of instruction in all subjects.

● Order No. 74 is based on assumptions that mother tongues are superior to

English in education, and on studies that show that pupils taught in their mother
tongues perform relatively well in international tests.

● Support for mother tongue instruction has come from a diverse range of sectors
in Philippine society, and a pending bill in congress supports the vision of mother
tongue instruction. An opposing bill, House Bill 4701, attempts to reinstate the
use of English as the sole medium of instruction.

● Several individuals, government agencies and professional organizations have

taken an unwavering stand in favor of mother tongue-based multilingual
education, including the Philippine Business for Education, Komisyon sa Wikang
Filipino and the Linguistic Society of the Philippines.

● The MLE framework is really not new, and has been used in
non-formal/indigenous/minority schools in the country for a long time. It has
rarely been questioned, possibly because it has been used "outside" the
mainstream education system where the bilingual education policy was put in
place. The mother tongue argument is an empirical argument that mother
tongues facilitate learning more effectively than non-local media of instruction.
However, the mother tongue argument takes on highly political and ideological
dimensions if contextualized in specific situations and periods of time.

● In the process of institutionalizing bilingual education, Filipino, the national

language, was used as medium of instruction, while the rest of the mother
tongues were lost from sight.

● Recent MLE-related articulations push the mother tongue argument further,

arguing that mother tongues should be the media of instruction, not English
and/or Filipino. This poses a new challenge to existing configurations of issues
related to language politics in the country.

The New Challenge Of Mother Tongues

● The argument that mother tongues are superior to national languages is now
used to argue for the use of mother tongues as media of instruction, as has been
empirically proven in research.

● DepEd Order No. 74 displaced English and Filipino as media of instruction in

primary schools and ushered in the possibility of a multilingual education in the
Philippines. Whether MLE succeeds in the end still remains to be seen. MLE
envisions the flourishing of all languages in society through the promotion of
English and Filipino in school, both as media of instruction and as subjects to be
learned. It claims that this can lead to more improved and successful learning of
both languages.

● Despite high-profile opposition to Tagalog-based Filipino as the country's national

language, the sentiment on the ground seems to have shifted in favor of its
acceptance as the country's national language.

● The problem with using Filipino as the local lingua franca of the nation to argue
for its (continuing) institutionalization as medium of instruction is that it de-links
the national language question from the issue of medium of instruction.

● The third implication of MLE is the possibility of re-mapping the nation through
mother tongue instruction. This is possible because the recent DepEd Order No.
76 attempts to mainstream mother tongue instruction in formal, arguably
non-marginalized schools across the country.

● The Alternative Learning System (ALS) Curriculum for Indigenous Peoples (IPs)
Education was institutionalized by DepEd on September 14, 2010 and was
prepared with the help of the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples
(NCIP) and various indigenous cultural communities.

● The ALS curriculum is framed within an MLE approach to education, where the
mother tongues are the media of instruction. However, mainstreaming the ALS
curriculum into formal education is very difficult because of lack of certification
and equivalency.

● Bilingual education was envisioned to foster national unity and national

consciousness among Filipinos through the use of the national language as
medium of instruction. However, people from minority or indigenous communities
were not part of this collective imagining.
The Future Debates

● The new challenge of mother tongues requires new terms of engagement in

postcolonial language politics in the country, including issues concerning Filipino
as the national language and Filipino as a/the medium of instruction. Moreover, it
is imperative for postcolonial language debates to deal with the politics of
inclusion and exclusion in Philippine education.

● A nationalist language argument grounded on the need for a national language to

foster a national unity and collective imagining of the nation, can the mother
tongues serve as the bulwark of nationalist ideals?

● The bilingual education policy of 1974 was the first formal education platform to
accommodate a local language, P/Filipino, together with English, as a political
solution to the enduring problem of (neo)colonialism in the country. However, the
same bilingual education infrastructure was used by the Marcos dictatorship to
consolidate its power.

● Postcolonial language politics must take into greater consideration the role of
content in Philippine education. The young respondents of Canieso-Doronilla's
study have as yet no conception of what it means to be a Filipino.

Conclusion

● As late as 2003, when former President Gloria Arroyo issued a memorandum

that would put English back as the "sole" medium of instruction in the country, the
debates over the main language of instruction did not substantially advance the
ideological structure of the debates.

● The recent challenge of the mother tongues substantially reconfigures the terms
of engagement in postcolonial language politics in the Philippines. The medium
and substance of nationalism should animate the future of postcolonial language
politics in the country.