Talk of the Town: What are Filipinos reading?

Comment on: “What are Filipinos reading?” (Gray Matters by Michael L. Tan, 4/23/24) via www.inquirer.net:

Prof. Tan, like Prof. Ocampo who discussed the results of the book readership survey earlier, missed the most important results of the survey: majority of Filipinos (children and adults) prefer reading in Filipino and Filipino writers. It’s because they understand Filipino (“more familiar words” to citetheir main reason) better than English which explains why Filipinos have low reading comprehension, but that is in English. He is right though about why Filipinos lag behind other Asians (and the rest of the world in science and math), they have low reading comprehension in English so they can’t understand lessons in math and science when taught in English. It is a language problem, dear professors. Read again the various research and studies done here and abroad—students taught in their own language learn better and get passing grades than those taught in a foreign language like English in the Philippines and India. India whose most common language is Hindi, took the Pisa test in English in 2009—they were at the bottom like the Philippines in 2018.

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