When the Philippine education system updated the 10-year primary and high school curriculum into what is called K-12, the Department of Education decided to strategically add foreign language subjects to the curriculum and also implement foreign language programs.
I haven’t seen any further data available online regarding this matter aside from the articles that were published in 2018 which mentioned that the special foreign language curriculum included the following languages – Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish. There are probably other languages intended to be added into the program but these are the top languages mentioned in those articles.
Last week, in relation to learning foreign languages, I published a podcast episode tackling why the Filipino youth should start learning foreign languages now.
I actually have two main points for this.
First is that the Filipino people are very natural at learning languages. This is because most of the Filipino people already speak three languages from the time they start going to school. These languages are Filipino, English, and a language native to the area or region they came from.
I, for example, started using English, Filipino, and Pangasinan when I studied in school.
Of course, proficiency in these three languages may vary. Still, I believe that knowing three languages is already an advantage in terms of foreign language acquisition.
Additionally, I believe that Filipinos who learn a foreign language are able to increase their value as a person – monetary value in terms of increased earning potential and added social and cultural value in terms of having a better perspective at understanding and viewing the global community.
All these points are explained further in a podcast episode that is now available on Spotify.
You can listen to it using this link or simply use the embedded player below:
Let’s learn something new every day!
Rome Juanatas 