A proposed English speech curriculum using the filipino language for Philippine ESL student-athletes

Abstract

The recent shift of Philippine Sports Media from full use of the English language in their game annotations and courtside interviews to bilingualism did not appease studentathletes in their perception of their speaking competency in the use of the English language. English, after all, in this country is considered an erudite language or the language of the learned that still dominates Philippine social domains like sports media. This seems to stem from the notion that ESL speakers must conform to the phonological standards of English, which are often prescribed in academic and business institutions. Also, speaking is often viewed by students as one of the five macro skills in English language learning that is very difficult. In this paper, the author proposes a speech class curriculum using the local language (Filipino) for student-athletes. This curriculum was first developed through a needs analysis using the results of a thematic and unstructured interview with four of the top student-athletes from a Manila-based university. The paper used Lin’s (2010) Multimodalities/Entextualization Cycle (MEC) as the framework of the curriculum. A lesson cycle of a topic that is included in the respondent-athletes’ current speech class syllabus was also developed based on the suggested curriculum.