Abstract
In this chapter, I offer the reader a brief sketch of speech communication education in the Philippines. I then discuss how the technicist framework animates the pedagogical practices of speech teachers by framing speech communication education within the discourse of the knowledge business enterprise (Fairclough 2006). To substantiate my argument, I offer a preliminary analysis of selected speech communication textbooks to demonstrate how the technicist approach is realized in course materials, that is, how students are geared to be the marketable English-speaking commodities that the industry demands from institutions of higher learning. I suggest that one of the ways that we can counter this technicist orientation is by revitalizing the notion of speech communication as a liberal art. Such a counter-perspective would allow us to emphasize not just skills that are demanded by industry, but also those that are pivotal in transforming the industry and the society at large.
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Notes
- 1.
This could be a department of speech and drama, speech communication, or communication arts.
- 2.
Examples include the University of the Philippines (UP) in Diliman which offers bachelor’s and master’s programs in speech communication and Silliman University in Dumaguete which offers a bachelor’s program in speech and theater. Other constituent universities of the UP System like UP Los Banos and UP Baguio offer communication arts or communication studies programs with speech communication as an area of concentration.
- 3.
RGEP stands for Revised General Education Program launched in 2001 in the University of the Philippines (UP) System. The revised or reconfigured speech communication courses in several constituent universities like UP Diliman and UP Los Banos generally carry similar objectives.
- 4.
Another text considered for analysis is the book titled Speak Smart: A Textbook for Spoken English by J. G. San Miguel, D. C. T. Barraquio, and R. DV. Revilla (Quezon City: C & E Publishing, 2007). The book is, however, meant to prepare students for the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) and the International English Language Testing System (IELTS). This purpose distinguishes this textbook from the three in that the rest reflect the scope and content usually covered in higher education courses in speech and oral communication. Also considered but excluded in the analysis is the classic text English Pronunciation for the Filipino College Student (Quezon City: Ken) by Lourdes Sevilla Mata and Isabella Sevilla Soriano, both trained in the Philippines and the United States. The book, which was first published in 1967 and which has had a couple editions, is directed to the speech development of Filipino students as second language learners.
- 5.
Tan spends half of her book for “speech improvement” (i.e., 237 pages out of 444 excluding the appendices which contain sample materials for oral interpretation) that to my mind demonstrates the author’s resolve to address the “speech problems” of Filipino students.
- 6.
I would like to point out that the analysis presented in this chapter is preliminary and primarily based on an informed but less than comprehensive examination of textbooks, which arguably serve their purpose quite well: that is, to offer consolidated teaching resources to teachers in speech communication in the Philippines. Having said that, I believe the limitation of the analysis necessitates an extensive observation and study of how Filipino teachers actually teach speech communication in the classroom, how they exploit or use the existing resources for their own purposes, how they recontextualize these resources, and how they potentially resist the seduction of the technicist framework.
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Acknowledgments
I wish to acknowledge Ruanni Tupas, Zhou Ziqian Jan, and Isabel Pefianco Martin for their invaluable comments on the earlier drafts of this chapter.
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Navera, G.S. (2018). The Technicist Framework and the Teaching of Speech Communication in the Philippines. In: Martin, I. (eds) Reconceptualizing English Education in a Multilingual Society. English Language Education, vol 13. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7528-5_10
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