GUEST COLUMNIST
By Nika Llamanzares
Before leaving for college abroad, I was invited to a college send-off party. As expected, most of the kids invited were international school students. Their curriculum was built to satisfy international university requirements.
However, I did not expect that most of them could not hold a conversation in Filipino. This did not seem like a coincidence. Almost all of my friends from international schools cannot speak Filipino, despite living in the Philippines their whole lives. When I asked my younger cousin if she would ever consider learning Filipino, she said no. She told me, “It won’t be important when I grow up”.
I do not believe this phenomenon comes from a place of malice, especially from kids who just passed puberty. However, I do believe this mindset may have been an implicit result of how international school curriculums are structured.
Learning Filipino does not seem to be a priority in these curriculums, based on how the language is introduced to students. As most of these schools adopt American or British curriculums, they usually introduce the International Baccalaureate (IB), wherein students are encouraged to learn their mother tongue in senior high school. While this opportunity is better than none, it does come with significant caveats.
For one, students are said to be more fluent at a language if it is introduced in their primary years, according to a UNESCO study in 2022. Because Filipino is introduced so late into the curriculum, students’ are not guaranteed a stable foundation for learning. Moreover, starting later would result in students not being able to learn age-appropriate concepts as they would be at the same level of proficiency as a grade schooler, another study revealed.
Though there should not be an age restriction to learning, being able to speak the language of other countries better than your own is when it can become an issue. Schools that adopt the Cambridge International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE), which requires students to take a foreign language in middle school, exclude Filipino as a possible language
Other schools that do not adhere to the certification, still require students to take either Spanish, French, or Chinese Mandarin in middle school. Despite being located in the Philippines, these schools tend to make access to the Filipino language more difficult than languages that the average Filipino does not use.
These factors could then result in the possibility that these students’ mother tongue will be replaced entirely. According to a study by Ohyama conducted in 2017, if a local language is not properly maintained, a student’s first language will turn into the default language of instruction. While English is the main mode of instruction across all Philippine schools, regardless if it's an international school or not, Filipino is still kept as a mandatory subject in traditional schools.
Given how we are ranked 20th out of 113 countries in English proficiency, we can infer that traditional schools may encourage both English and Filipino without omitting one to focus on the other. Students may then be able to learn English without sacrificing their mother tongue. This observation then begs the question why International schools still choose to forgo mandatory Filipino entirely when it is possible to make the two national languages mandatory. If this trend continues, the likelihood that students will lose access to their mother tongue may increase.
With how inaccessible Filipino is in these schools, students may incorrectly conclude that the language is not important in the grand scheme of things. This mindset may be a common phenomenon across any international school, according to a study conducted in Serbia in 2019. Students in international schools grow up thinking that their mother tongue, Serbian, was unimportant as all their learning is in English.
This devaluation of their mother tongue may not seem significant to their classroom performance, but could be detrimental to their overall development.
On a personal level, students will grow up unsure of their identity as the local language is key to understanding a country’s culture. On a more practical level, not learning the local language greatly isolates students from opportunities outside of the classroom. In the Serbian study, it was also observed that students were unable to discuss complex, meaningful ideas with loved ones who spoke the local language.
This inability to converse not only hinders these students from expanding their social circle, but also their abilities to think critically in contexts outside school.
(Nika Llamanzares is currently a college student studying communications at the University of Southern California. You may reach her at [email protected].)