In the 1899 Malolos Constitution, written by patriots while Spain negotiated handing over the country to the United States, it says that the use of the languages spoken in the Philippines is optional…. [For] public authorities and judicial affairs, the Spanish language shall be used for the present (Art. 93). Spanish was then the only language of government the country knew, even if most people were not schooled in it; the Spanish thought that keeping the natives ignorant was the best way to maintain their rule. Americans, on the other hand, saw it as part of the white man’s burden to educate the people and propagate democracy. And so, among the first things established under American rule was a system of public education in English. Famous are the Thomasites, missionary teachers collectively named after the ship that took them to Philippine shores (U.S. Embassy Manila, 2001). The Commonwealth Constitution of 1935, drafted as America prepared to grant independence, declares that

The Congress shall take steps toward the development and adoption of a common national language based on one of the existing native languages. Until otherwise provided by law, English and Spanish shall continue as official languages (Art. 14, Sec. 3).

The Marcos Constitution of 1973 was promulgated in English and Pilipino – which were also designated official languages – and translated into each dialect spoken by over fifty thousand people, and into Spanish and Arabic. In case of conflict, the English text shall prevail. The national legislature was also charged with taking steps toward the development and adoption of a common national language to be known as Pilipino (Art. 15, Sec. 3).

The present Constitution, adopted in 1987, formally asked Congress to create a national language commission to develop and propagate a national language. It also has the most detailed provision on language to date. It states that:

The national language of the Philippines is Filipino. As it evolves, it shall be further developed and enriched on the basis of existing Philippine and other languages. Subject to provisions of law and as the Congress may deem appropriate, the Government shall take steps to initiate and sustain the use of Filipino as a medium of official communication and as language of instruction in the educational system (Art. 14, Sec. 6).

For purposes of communication and instruction, the official languages of the Philippines are Filipino and, until otherwise provided by law, English. The regional languages are the auxiliary official languages in the regions and shall serve as auxiliary media of instruction therein. Spanish and Arabic shall be promoted on a voluntary and optional basis (Art. 14, Sec 7).

From the foregoing constitutions, one sees the gradual diminution and eclipse of Spanish, and the progressive rise and ascent of a national language. This national language, Filipino, is a curiosity though. The proceedings of the constitutional commission make clear the commissioners were not convinced that such a language existed. Filipino was a term with a sense but without a reference (Gonzalez & Villacorta, 2001, p. 8). The language was declared into being by Constitutional fiat.

The clause until otherwise provided by law in the present Constitution indicates that English is to have a diminished place in Philippine life in the future. But the clause is also a tacit admission that English cannot be done without at present. The 1973 Constitution says that "in case of conflict, the English text [of the Constitution] shall prevail. The 1987 Constitution did away with that provision, and placed Filipino higher than English. However, because the deliberations of the constitutional commission were in English, points of law in the future will continue to depend more on the English than the Filipino version of the text. More recently, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo invoked the need to be globally competitive in declaring that until Congress enacts a law mandating Filipino as the language of instruction, I am directing the Department of Education to return English as the primary medium of instruction, provided some subjects still be taught in Filipino (Martin, 2003, p. 1).

The country, in other words, remains conflicted about the language to be used in the land. There is the language which reflects aspirations for national unity, and there is the language which paves the way for financial gain. It is difficult to say which is more important, and it remains to be seen whether English will indeed have a lesser place in the polity, given global realities. The linguist and former education secretary Andrew Gonzalez (1999) writes that in choosing between symbolic value and socio-economic value, the latter usually takes priority (p. xiii). Any which way, the Constitution states the present status quo: Filipino and English as official languages, with regional languages as auxiliary media of instruction.

It is not enough to say that there will be up to three languages in any particular place the educational system appears. With English, for example, it needs to be determined which variety of English is to be learned. There are conceivably two main places where English will be used. One group needs English for commerce in urban centers such as Manila and Cebu. As such, the variety of English to use would be that variety of English as used and understood in the Philippines, i.e. Philippine English. This variety of English might have features that are considered non-standard, but these examples of transfer or interference are shared by members of the speech community, and so, far from impeding communication, actually facilitates it (Siegel, 2003).

But beyond use in the Philippines, there are a large number who need facility in English to gain employment in other countries. There are currently more than a million Filipinos overseas who work as nurses, IT professionals, and engineers, and their numbers are growing. There are also those who work in call centers, who remain in the Philippines but whose primary use of English is with native speakers of the language. Thus, there is the need for a Philippine English that is not too far removed from standard varieties of English. A name given to this compromise variety is phonemic English, that is, English that does not reveal the local Philippine region or native language of the speaker, but understood by educated speakers of English (Sibayan, 1999, p. 413).

Then, there is Filipino, a language that possibly exists and possibly does not exist. The language is primarily based on Tagalog grammar, admitting contributions of lexis from other Philippine and world languages that it comes in contact with (Gonzalez & Villacorta, 2001). The question is how well a new language such as this can serve as a medium of instruction. The opinion is that while it can presently be used for primary and secondary education, it will take at least another century before Filipino becomes sufficiently intellectualized for use in higher education and research (Sibayan, 1999). It should be kept in mind as well that Filipino is equally a second language as English for a great number of Filipinos.

It has also been pointed out by Cummins (1983) that languages proficiency can be of two kinds, what he calls basic interpersonal communication skills (BICS) and cognitive/academic language proficiency (CALP). The Filipino that Filipinos use in day-to-day interactions is different than the Filipino found in textbooks and used in classrooms. There is a need to reflect on the reasons why language is acquired and taught in classrooms. If it is primarily to teach communication, then BICS Filipino must be taught. If the purpose is to prepare Filipinos for higher education in the language, then CALP should be it. What should be kept in mind is that a choice for CALP means choosing a very different language than what most people know. As well, it means leaving untapped and not taking advantage of the BICS knowledge that people already come knowing.

The regional languages present a challenge of their own. Those with a large number of speakers probably have a literacy tradition to some extent, but other languages are mostly oral, possessing little prestige even among their speakers, and perhaps not suited for education. The absence of textbooks and instructional material in these languages is another important consideration. As well, it is the reality that the higher one moves in education and the more one aspires to professional excellence, the smaller is the number of languages employed as the medium of instruction (Srivastava, 1988, p. 264). On the whole, the Constitution appears to be on the mark; major regional languages can be used as auxiliary media of instruction where it is the L1, with Filipino and English as the main media of instruction more generally throughout the country. The question now is how several languages can be taught together effectively.

The concern of some people is that giving time to teaching an L2 will take away from time learning the more desirable language (i.e. in the Philippine context, English). They are afraid that the deterioration of skills in the English language is caused by the bilingual education policy that the country has had in place since 1974. Research has shown that this fear is unfounded, that the decline in English was not caused by the bilingual education policy, as amount of time schools implemented the program was not related to student achievement (Gonzalez & Sibayan, 1988). Similar results have also been found for Latino children in the Carpenteria Preschool Program (Campos, 1995).

An explanation offered for this is the linguistic interdependence theory, which is formally stated in the following way:

To the extent that instruction in Lx is effective in promoting proficiency in Lx, transfer of this proficiency to Ly will occur provided there is adequate exposure to Ly (either in school or environment) and adequate motivation to learn Ly (Cummins, 1988, p. 156).

This theory is certainly related to the Chomskyian notion that languages are different only in terms of surface features, and that there is a universal grammar that underlies all languages. As such, developing knowledge in one language is in some way developing knowledge about other languages. The implication of this for policy, Cummins (1988) writes, is that for language minority students, L1 academic skills can be strongly promoted at no cost to the development of English academic skills (p. 157). There are implications for pedagogy as well. Teachers need not and should not cover the same ground twice. They also need to determine what the student already knows, and then adjust instruction accordingly.

The theory of a common underlying proficiency has to be qualified, however. In the above quoted definition, the most ambiguous term has to be adequate, which appears twice. What actually constitutes adequate exposure to a language? This is the question behind the language threshold hypothesis. Learners, it is claimed, need to reach a certain level of proficiency in the L2 before reading skills from the L1 will transfer (Carrell & Grabe, 2002).

Empirical studies have supported this position, showing that reading ability in L1 and proficiency in L2 together explains a large proportion of the variance in L2 reading. The relative effect of each separately, however, is not consistent. For example, L1 reading ability is a better predictor of success in L2 reading among Hispanic children learning English, whereas for English-speaking children learning Spanish, L2 proficiency is the better predictor. The conclusion that can be come up with at this point, then, is that while the threshold exists, there seems to be a continuously changing relationship as L2 proficiency increases, not necessarily in terms of the existence of a specific ‘threshold’ (Carrell & Grabe, 2002, p. 244).

Work on the brain and neuro-cognition also falsifies the notion that learning two languages is an impediment or somehow undesirable, as was the belief in the past (Bialystok & Hakuta, 1994). Genesee (2001) shows that children are able to distinguish two languages from the one-word stage on; the two languages are not confused. Bilingual children are also either equal to or advantaged over monolingual children in terms of metalinguistic skills. For example, they are better able to separate a word from the thing it represents. In other words, they understand better the arbitrary nature of language, and so are more facile at manipulating it (Bialystok, 2001). Among the manifestations of this is code-switching, the ability to move between two languages with ease according to norms of appropriateness and communicative need. Gonzalez (1999) writes that Filipinos who speak Taglish, the combination of Tagalog and English do so for sociolinguistic reasons and not out of ignorance of the two systems; in fact, I daresay that only those who have really mastered the two codes are able to use Taglish effectively (p. 546).

In general, there is ample research supporting the notion of bilingual education. Or, at the very least, indicates that bilingualism poses no inherent problems in itself. The linguistic interdependence theory and the linguistic threshold hypothesis are complementary and related, and help illuminate the relationship between a person’s L1 and L2. However, that the threshold is not known, or that it might be moveable, presents a practical problem for policy. Indeed, skills in one language can support skills in another, and well and good if the threshold is not only reached but far exceeded; strength can build upon strength. But the converse can also be true; it is possible that the unknown threshold is not reached, in which case the putative transfer will not occur, leaving a child weak in both languages, and thus become even more disadvantaged (Cummins, 1981).

The threshold being movable might simply mean that we haven’t accounted for the factors that affect this threshold. Indeed, the factors that have been accounted for so far are all cognitive in nature. The studies showing differences between Spanish learners of English and English learners of Spanish point to difference in backgrounds, contexts, and demographics as important variables that need to be taken into consideration.

One difference between a dominant L2 setting and an institutional L2 setting is that in the former, standard versions of the L2 are spoken and widely available in the environment. Thus, L2 learners in such settings can learn the language not only from school, but also from hearing it used by people around him outside of schools. That is not the case in institutional L2 settings. Since the L2 is not the dominant language, children are not as likely to encounter it in the environment, and so the full burden of learning the language rests in the instructional context of the classroom. Research has shown, in fact, that different parts of the brain are used depending on this particular distinction of the manner in which the language is learned (Genesee, 1988). This might have to do as well with the distinction between BICS and CALP previously mentioned (Cummins, 1983), as language learned in the environment is more likely to be BICS language, and those learned in the classroom being of the latter variety.

Whatever is taught in the classroom, there is also the fact that there are few avenues outside for practicing what has been learned, and the viability of such an enterprise can certainly be questioned. A study done among marginalized communities in the Philippines shows, for example, that literacy programs are beneficial only insofar as literate practices are integrated into the life of the communities. Otherwise, literacy skills and training have no effect on people’s thought processes and no practical relevance in their lives (Bernardo, 1998). This echoes the work of Shirley Brice-Heath (1983), and suggests that together with education, government needs to move other policy levers to introduce literate practices where they do not exist, as a way to ensure that learning takes place effectively.

Another factor that needs to be considered is whether the L2 is valued or not. In the United States, for example, the value of an L2 is conflicted. Sociolinguist Joshua Fishman notes that many Americans have long been of the opinion that bilingualism is 'a good thing' if it was acquired via travel (preferably to Paris) or via formal education (preferably at Harvard) but that it is a 'bad thing' if it was acquired from one’s immigrant parents or grandparents (qtd. in Bialystok & Hakuta, 1994, p. 215-216). In American schools, the aim is for English to eventually replace the home languages of minority children, what is known as subtractive bilingualism (Lambert, 1974).