Is English Proficiency in the Philippines is good?

 MAKATI CITY, METRO MANILA — Despite a recent report that excluded the Philippines among countries with high English proficiency, the country remains competitive as evidenced by the outsourcing industry.

Just recently, US-based English training and testing institution Education First came out with an English proficiency ranking report of 44 countries, apparently the first to be released.

Of the Asian countries that were included in the report Malaysia had the highest English proficiency index (EPI) of 55.54, a "high proficiency" level, and is ranked 9th.

Despite an industry that offers English-based outsourcing services, the Philippines was not included in the ranking. Already, the ranking report has received some criticism especially among Filipinos.

But the absence of the Philippines does not mean that the country is faring lower than Kazakhstan, which ranked 44th with a "very low" English proficiency EPI of 31.75.

An email reply from Eric Feng, an executive from EF's Hong Kong office,

explained that there was insufficient data to render a ranking for the Philippines.

This data is the number of EF test takers per country from 2007 to 2009 and the minimum limit to be part of the ranking is 400 test takers. In addition, countries with less than 100 test takers per two or more tests offered by EF per country were excluded.

Simply put, there were only a few Filipinos that took EF's exams. Consider also that EF does not have an office in the Philippines, thus it is more difficult for the company to provide testing and acquire data.

Feng also said that he cannot speak about the possibility of including the Philippines in their future rankings. "But I should have a clearer idea three to four months from now," he said.

This methodology was also disclosed in their full report, which also stated that there were 2,368,730 test takers that were included in the ranking.

But even without an English proficiency ranking for the Philippines, the country still enjoys a good English speaking population, as represented by half a million English-proficient employees of the US$8.9 billion business process outsourcing industry".

Click the source below.

One of the commentator of that article who analyse the reason of what television and social networking affects specially to the children regarding that issue.

Here are the following.

1. Cartoons, movies and other kiddie programs aired on TV are now dubbed in Filipino.
2. Habitual use of SMS shortcuts, tweets, etc. with mixed dialects are often adapted in school especially in sentence construction and grammar use. Note also the use of styles like "jejemon".
3. Lack of proficient English teachers. Sadly, many high school graduates today especially from the public school can't even write a perfect sentence or paragraph. Many would have difficulty in understanding English statements. It may reflect that teachers are not that efficient or effective nowadays.
4. Too much exposure of technolo----. Kids today are lazy over school projects. While we use to make summary of a book that was read, kids would rather look up in the internet, and use the "copy and paste technique". Surprisingly, the teachers wouldn't even bother to check its content.
5. Educators has introduced many methodolo---- of teaching subjects at school claiming that it would improve the student's capability of learning at the shortest possible time. Many shortcuts were introduced in every new curriculum. But they forgot the basic: that learning takes time and lots of practice.

 Source: http://ph.news.yahoo.com/blogs/the-inbox/english-proficiency-ph-still-good-20110411-232650-442.html 

 By: Alexander Villafania, loQal.ph | The Inbox – Tue, Apr 12, 2011 2:26 PM