Recently there has been a report by the BBC on English teaching in the Philippines. Obviously, the journalist didn't do their homework. They interviewed a few teachers and staff members but didn't bother to see the true inside story.
She looked at courses in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, but the programme at De La Salle was a quarter of the price of the others.
"Here it's much cheaper, and I'm really confident that the qualification I'll get is just the same," she says.
Right. Sadly, that's not true. Here in Bacolod, the St. La Salle University employs around 100 teachers for their Global Center for Communications. However, despite the claim that all their teachers hold English teaching or ESL degrees, that's not even close to being true. In fact, the majority of their recent teaching hires in August consists of nurses and call center agents who have absolutely no formal teaching background. Much of the focus on hiring tends to be geared towards accents. Since so many teachers are needed at the school, a formal education background is not required.
Furthermore, while costs of studying in the Philippines is $500 per 60 hours, the teacher sees only a small portion of the fund. Teachers begin work with the university as part-time, earning only 50 pesos per hour. Therefore, teachers are earning less than 1/7th of what the student pays to the university.
This not only drives quality teachers away from the program, but it also hurts the foreign students by not receiving the best education possible. The teachers are teaching students wrong phrases, horrible sentence structure, and words with the wrong meaning. In many cases, they are also teaching the students "Filipino English", such as the phrase "so serious".
Even though there is a huge cost advantage of learning English in the Philippines, the learning centers are far from being up to the task. Poor teacher evaluations (which are left up to the students and not to the faculty) and ill-equipped dormitories (students complain of warm rooms) leaves much to be desired.
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