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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