Lawmaker sees need for multilingual skills for Pinoys

THE Commission on Higher Education (CHED) should push schools to sell foreign language courses to encourage more Filipinos to develop multilingual skills needed in information technology-enabled services (ITES), an educator-turned-lawmaker said.

“We may need more college graduates with foreign language skills in order to secure and develop the Philippine brand—our niche in the global business process outsourcing [BPO] industry,” Rep. Eduardo Gullas of Cebu said.

He noted that local call centers servicing United States-based clients have been aggressively recruiting through print ads and offering premium pay to customer-service agents with non-English foreign language skills, particularly Spanish.

This is because a growing number of American customers making calls to centers here are Spanish-speaking US immigrants from Mexico, Gullas pointed out.

He cited an IBM Corp. report indicating that over 31 million Americans, or 12 percent, of the US population now speak Spanish.

“We should keep our focus on English proficiency, which is our best asset as a brand. English is still the language of technology. Our English skills have enabled us to get 30 percent of all IT-enabled service jobs being offshored from the US,” Gullas said.

“However, we should also not lose sight of the need to add more value to the brand. It would be good if we produced young people with multilingual skills,” he added.

Gullas has a bill that seeks to revive English as the medium of instruction in schools. Two House committees earlier jointly endorsed the bill for floor approval.

He said the University of the Philippines’ College of Arts and Letters has a full-fledged Department of European Languages that could serve as a model for other schools.

Next to the US, the European Union (EU) is the biggest source of IT-enabled service jobs being offshored to low-wage countries like India and the Philippines.

Outside of English, the top five most commonly spoken languages in the EU are German, French, Italian, Spanish and Dutch.

German, French, Italian and Spanish are also among the top 10 languages on the Internet, along with English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Russian, according to Global Reach, a consulting firm specializing in multilingual online promotion.