Colonial education and the shaping of Philippine literature in English

Exploring grammatical colloquialisation in non-native English: a case study of Philippine English

“…In the following decades, which saw the formation of PhilE, English teaching in the classroom was conducted mainly via grammatical analysis and imitation exercises. Teachers presented Anglo-American literary canons including those of Matthew Arnold, Washington Irving, Henry Longfellow and Ralph Waldo Emerson, as well as those of Shakespeare, as examples of ‘good English’ (Gonzalez 2008; Martin 2008). Exposure to such texts and sustained writing practice had direct effects on students’ writing.…”

“…Gonzalez (1991) noted that Filipino students of the colonial period tended to write compositions in an antiquated, lofty Victorian style featuring archaic expressions and florid sentences, what he called the ‘Philippine classroom composition style’. In 1925, the Board of Educational Survey conducted a comprehensive study of the Philippine public system and reported that ‘children in upper grades seem to have a “reciting” knowledge of more technical English grammar than most children in corresponding grades in American schools’ (cited in Martin 2008: 251). The continuing influence of the colonial pedagogic tradition is reflected in the penchant for complex and formal grammatical features in the earlier PhilE press.…”

Book Mavens of Manila : an interpretative phenomenological analysis of contemporary niche publishers in the Philippines

“…The Spaniards left in 1898 after forging a turnover deal with the Americans at the cost of twenty million dollars . While the Spanish were very hostile to Filipinos interested in learning to speak or read their language (Abinales & Amoroso, 2005), the Americans used English to instruct (Boudreau, 2003;Silbey, 2008), or as some would say indoctrinate (Nadeau, 2008;Martin, 2008), or even miseducate (Constantino, 1970) the natives by way of their benevolent assimilation. The Americans brought in suffrage, the American-style bicameral legislature, and the Commonwealth presidency into the Philippines (Hedman & Sidel, 2000)-a radical contrast to the stringent Spanish government.…”

“…It was indeed a good time for publishing in the vernacular. As Martin (2008) However, both Jurilla and Martin observed that the Americans still used their own textbooks in Philippine classrooms. Jurilla recounted that even though Filipino-authored textbooks were in publication in the early 1900s, imported textbooks still governed the market (so that even Filipino-authored schoolbooks were printed in the States and then imported into the Philippines).…”

“…Such hegemonic endeavors were unsurprising, as the Americans did cultivate a dependent relationship for their colonies in terms of economy and trade (Hedman & Sidel, 2000), coupled with the fact that most Filipino-authored textbooks were not written in English, and were hence against the interests of the colonizers (Martin, 2008). Nonetheless, Philippine literature both in English and the vernacular thrived during this time.…”