Allan B. I. Bernardo De La Salle University-Manila Philippines email: bernardoa@dlsu.edu.ph Teaching in English in Philippine Higher Education: The Case of De La Salle University-Manila (a joint paper with Marianne Jennifer M. Gaerlan)

The medium of instruction (MOI) in higher education in the Philippines has always been a foreign language: Spanish, then English. The first colleges/universities where established by Spanish religious orders in the 17th Century during the Spanish colonial period. Various American groups established American-type institutions during the American colonial period starting the 1900s. Since then, the MOI in colleges/universities has always been English, even with no explicit government policy to this effect, and even in institutions established by Filipinos. The experience of De La Salle University-Manila is examined as a case of a university without an explicit MOI policy, but has several practices that maintain and even perpetuate the status quo, even as the academic community has engaged in debates on the efficacy of such practices. Presently there are efforts to strengthen teaching of English, and learning in English (but not teaching in English) undertaken with reference to the requirements of globalization and discourses in scholarly disciplines. However, there have been no explicit efforts to examine the premises and consequences of the de facto MOI policy. The university’s experience is interpreted as being an exemplar of how the goals and values of the dominant sectors of Philippine society preserve the use of English as MOI, discourage attempts to critique the status quo, and minimize support for efforts to use Philippine languages as MOI.

Allan B. I. Bernardo is Professor and Fellow of De La Salle University-Manila. He has published in the areas of bilingual cognition and learning, literacy and cognition, and language in Philippine educations, among other. He obtained his Ph.D. (Cognitive Psychology) from Yale University.

Marianne Jennifer M. Gaerlan is a Lecturer in the Department of English and Applied Linguistics in De La Salle University-Manila. She obtained her M. A. in English Language Education from the same institution.