Stop dubbing! Pia Cayetano calls out TV stations: Show cartoons in original English


Senator Pia Cayetano | Photo from Rappler


Senator Pia Cayetano on Monday calls out the government broadcast stations to consider airing children’s program in its original English version instead of dubbing it in Tagalog.

Cayetano said watching it in English would help the children develop proficiency in the said language at a young age.

"Can we start showing a lot of cartoons and family-friendly materials on our government stations. Bakit ba kailangan i-dub? A language is learned earliest at their youngest. The earlier you are exposed to a language, the earlier you can pick it up," Cayetano said during a Senate hearing focused on futures thinking.

"Bakit ba kailangan ipilit i-dub 'yan? Just play it in English. It's cartoons, it's just meant for them to hear it... Pipilitin niyo pang i-dub 'yan, that will take more time, that will take more resources, will cost us and yet you can just be playing the thousands and millions of materials available online," the lady senator added

The statement from Cayetano came after Rex Wallen Tan, director of Government-Academe-Industry Network, Inc., cited a study in 2019 which showed that 54% of websites globally are using the English language.

"The internet drives much of today's business of learning and also of e-commerce.The best institutions in the world are providing their learning content for free—Harvard, Princeton, Coursera, edX, and the millions of Youtube teachers are free. Most of these free high-quality learnings are in English," Tan said.

"The world's content for free learning, largely, the best learning, advanced learning is in English... If kids don't understand English, they're locked out of kind of how to learn and also how to participate in the global economy," he added.

Cayetano said she has nothing against the Filipino language but pointed out that the Department of Education (DepEd) and Commission on Higher Education (CHED) should be more conscious that a lot of the jobs involve technologies that are in English.

"I have nothing against the mother tongue. I'm just saying that I've seen a shift between the English proficiencies of the generation of my parents, to my generation, to the younger generation and that was simply because there were political positions made and the shift happened and I'm not happy about it," she said.

"Just by looking at the data, the English proficiency of our college students are the same as Malaysian Grade 6 students and Japan taxi drivers. Nakakahiya, nakakaawa tayo," she added.

 

 

 


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