A Filipino Student Asks a Question: A Peace Corps Blog

A few weeks into teaching in the Philippines, I finally got the chance to give a writing assignment to my students at the Eastern Visayas State University. I wanted to know what they could write. I wanted to know what they could think. But most of all I wanted to fill up the final minutes of a class session which my co-teacher had sprung on me moments before students arrived. Their assignment was this:

Respond to one of the following questions. Please make your responses at least 20 words long.
1) Describe one thing you learned in class today
2) Ask me a question on any topic
3) Tell me something about yourself

My students dutifully took out their quarter sheets of paper (in the Philippines, teachers specify assignment length by page fractions) and set to work. Twenty minutes and forty furrowed brows later, I collected the responses.

I sat down to survey the literary landscape of these sixteen-to-twenty year olds majoring in Information Technology (which in the Philippines means you plan to work in a call center). And yes, the English teacher in me was quick to note that all of the responses contained grammatical errors.

But then something odd happened. Because when you move past that, when you realize that none of these errors affect comprehension, when you remember that for these students English is indeed a foreign language, well, you start to notice other stuff.

First, all the responses demonstrate a clear comprehension of the prompt. Well all except one, which I've got to share first for the sake how purely and inimitably bizarre it is:

Sir, do you have any idea about multi-level marketing? Can you be one of my friends? Can I ask you a favor that I can meet you in a certain place and talk about networking? [Later, after class, this response was clarified when the author approached me and gave a spiel about the pyramid-scheme network marketing vitamin company he was working for.]

But as I read through the rest of the responses, I noted a few things. Like this: many responses showed abstract, hypothetical and/or interpretive reasoning. And so many belied an avid curiosity, particularly toward personal-- in some cases, very personal--matters. Also: few or no responses involved self-expression. That is, no students had chosen to answer the question "Tell me some detail about your life." Did this reveal some facet of the Filipino weltanschauung? Or did my students simply not understand the question? I still don't know, but it sure got me thinking.

Here are the rest of the responses: