“Faulty English question,
fumbling English
answer”
By Jose A. Carillo
In a national beauty
competition in the Philippines in 2008, a badly phrased English question by its promoters in the Q&A portion elicited an embarrassingly fumbling
answer from one of the finalists, throwing a big question mark on the Filipino
people’s vaunted reputation for English proficiency.
Part 1 – Awful response of a beauty-and-brains contest finalist (March 29, 2008)
Shortly before Holy Week in the year 2008 or almost 17 years ago, Mr. Roquito Lorenzo, a reader of my English-usage column in The Manila Times, forwarded to me YouTube links and a transcript of the much-talked-about fumbling response of a beauty contest finalist—let’s just identify her as Miss Jenny S. here to spare her from further embarrassment—in the interview portion of that year’s competition for the Binibining Pilipinas title.
Mr. Lorenzo’s e-mail asked me this question: “As an advocate of the English language, sir, what can you say about this? I found it really disgusting, and I believe it’s the result of our country’s shift from English to Pilipino as the medium of instruction. I think we need to go back to the use of English as medium of instruction in all school levels.”
Here’s my open reply to Mr. Lorenzo:
“Like many other Filipinos, I share your disappointment that Miss Jenny’s remarks in fumbling English fell far below what was expected from a young woman aspiring for international recognition as a beauty-and-brains queen. But before we condemn her and before we generalize on her performance as a reflection of a declining English proficiency among us Filipinos, let us pause for a while and examine what actually happened from a language standpoint during that interview.
“As we can see from the YouTube footage, one of the beauty contest judges, Ms. Vivienne Tan, posed this question to Miss Jenny S. from a written script picked from a tambiolo: ‘What role did your family play to you as candidate to Binibining Pilipinas?’
“Having been GM of an English services company who for nearly five years oversaw
the development of many English proficiency tests, I can tell you that that
question is terribly flawed both grammatically and semantically. Worse, it’s a
highly unfocused question calling for an abstract answer—one that surely won’t elicit
a quick, lucid, and straightforward response no matter how intelligent, alert,
and fluent in English the person being asked might be.
“Try some role-playing and imagine yourself as Miss Jenny being asked that same question: ‘What role did your family play to you as candidate to Binibining Pilipinas?’ I would imagine that if you’re a nonnative English speaker like me, you’d first try to make sense of its fractured grammar by translating it in your mind into Tagalog as, say, “Anong papel ang ginampanan ng pamilya mo para sa iyo bilang kandidata sa Binibining Pilipinas?’
“That doesn’t seem to make much sense either, so in panic, you’d probably try to mentally correct the grammar of the original question to make it more amenable to a decent, reasonable answer. If you are lucky to be rhetorically capable in English, you’d probably end up with this grammar-perfect question: ‘What role did your family play in your quest for the Binibining Pilipinas crown?’
“Even if the question is expressed this clearly, however, it still wouldn’t admit simple particulars for an answer—only abstract ones or tags. After so many agonizing seconds, the best you’d probably come up with are lame, unconvincing answers that play on the word ‘role’ in the context of movies and movie stars. In your heart, of course, you’d know that you won’t sound convincing with answers like those, for the simple reason that normal people—whether aspiring for a beauty crown or just applying for a much-coveted entry-level job—don’t talk in that highfalutin way.
“Try some role-playing and imagine yourself as Miss Jenny being asked that same question: ‘What role did your family play to you as candidate to Binibining Pilipinas?’ I would imagine that if you’re a nonnative English speaker like me, you’d first try to make sense of its fractured grammar by translating it in your mind into Tagalog as, say, “Anong papel ang ginampanan ng pamilya mo sa iyo bilang kandidata sa Binibining Pilipinas?’
“That
doesn’t seem to make much sense either, so in panic, you’d probably try to
mentally correct the grammar of the original question to make it more amenable
to a decent, reasonable answer. If you are lucky to be rhetorically capable in
English, you’d probably end up with this grammar-perfect question: ‘What role did your family play in your
quest for the Binibining Pilipinas crown?’
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIPT OF
MISS JENNY’S FUMBLING REPLY TO THE QUESTION: “WHAT ROLE DID YOUR FAMILY PLAY
FOR YOU AS CANDIDATE [OF] BINIBINING PILIPINAS?”
“Well, my family’s role for me is so important because there was the wa... they’re, they was the one who’s very [laughs]...
“Oh I’m so
sorry. Um, my family, my family. Oh my god. I’m…
“Ok, I’m so sorry. I, I told you that I’m so confident… Eto, um, wait… [laughs]."
Then she ended her answer with this apology: “Um,
sorry guys because this was really my first pageant ever because I’m only 17
years old and [laughs]...”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I thus have this feeling that Miss Jenny S. was stumped not so much because of an English inadequacy or the jitters, but because the question she was asked was so badly phrased and was too vague, too abstract, and too difficult to answer. Answering that question would require a very strong rhetorical flair that normally can’t be expected from a 17-year-old nonnative speaker of English.
Indeed, I challenge readers who were disgusted by Miss Jenny’s performance to role-play for her for exactly 60 seconds—never mind changing to a one-piece bathing suit or swimming trunks or imagining yourselves on-camera for a nationwide audience—and come up with a sensible answer to that badly phrased question.
I’ll take up in my next column the three most convincing suggested answers to that question.
Part 2 – Soliciting better answers to that faulty English question” (April 5, 2008)
In response to my open invitation, two readers of my column in The Manila Times observed that the question that had so befuddled Ms. Jenny S. wasn’t really that difficult to understand, then vigorously took up my challenge by coming up with several suggested answers that they thought might have satisfied the contest judges and the general public as well.
Before
discussing their answers in detail, however, I would like to take up first the
views e-mailed to me earlier by two other readers of my English-usage column—views
that I believe could help us establish clearer benchmarks for assessing our problems
with speaking English
Here’s the view of Mr. Alberto T. Pangilinan, a senior payroll specialist working in the United States:
“I agree with your premise 100 percent that the way the question was phrased was definitely out of bounds. Clearly, however, the shift in the country’s mode of school instruction from English to Tagalog did not help Miss Jenny S. and would not help other Filipinos in similar situations. I wish you could publish your response to Mr. Roquito Lorenzo’s question in other publications aside from The Manila Times so others may learn from your insightful explanation.
“I also wanted to get your opinion on whether it is proper for local folks when being interviewed on network TV back home to continually shift from English to Tagalog and vice versa. When the news footage is shown on the international news here, their responses are sometimes difficult to follow or understand, and a lot of folks here in the States are driven bonkers by them.”
And here are the thoughts of Ms. Faye Tierro-Mendiola, a long-time US resident:
“I
read your column and I agree with you. Unbeknown to me, the country’s medium of
instruction is now Tagalog. Since when was this? I’ve been living in the US for
33 years, but I go to the Philippines every year to participate in a medical
mission.
“We Filipinos used to be very proud that our medium of instruction was English. In fact, people of other nationalities—even Americans—used to be jealous over how fluently we spoke English and how good we were with English spelling. But I guess the situation there is not like this anymore.”
Here’s my joint reply to Mr. Pangilinan and Ms. Tierro-Mendiola:
“The shift from English to Filipino as our medium of instruction may have contributed to Miss Jenny’s fumbling answer, but I think not that much. As I explained last week, I think the bigger contributory factor was the low quality and low comprehensibility of the question itself that was posed to Miss Jenny S.
“Yes, Filipino was adopted as our language of instruction under the 1987 Philippine Constitution. But on May 17, 2003, to reverse the declining English literacy of Filipinos, [then] President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo issued Executive Order No. 210 restoring English as the primary medium of instruction. However, in April 2007, some educators supportive of the Filipino language challenged the legality of this executive order before the Supreme Court, where the matter as of this writing (2008) was still pending.
“As to TV news footages abroad showing Filipinos shifting from English to Tagalog and vice versa during interviews, there’s not much we can do about it. That’s really how most educated Filipinos speak today in the home setting.”
Part 3 - “The
question was clear enough but clumsy,” an American engineer commented (April 12,
2008)
This time, I will present and evaluate the answers given by the two other readers who had similarly taken up my challenge to play the role of Miss Jenny S. and respond to the same question.
Let’s first take up the answers of Mr. Douglas M. of New Jersey. He said that the question was clear enough but clumsy, and suggested improving its phrasing as follows: “What role did your family play that helped you become a candidate for Binibining Pilipinas?” He then offered these two complete answers that Miss Jenny could have used:
“My family fulfilled a leading role in the development of my code of morals simply by the example they set.”
“My family played a vital role in providing me with a stable and stimulating household that allowed me to develop myself as an individual.”
From a language standpoint, I must say that Mr. Douglas M.’s rephrasing of the question is only a slight improvement from the question actually posed to Miss Jenny S. It’s almost as semantically convoluted and as mired in abstraction as the original—still very much the kind of question that’s unlikely to elicit a specific, candid, and straightforward spoken answer. I dare say that not so many reasonably intelligent and English-proficient persons could manage to make sense of that grammatical and semantic tangle (They’d likely ask: “Why must a family specifically play a role at all in matters like this? Can’t a family just be itself doing what it must?).
Indeed, for such a highly abstract question, it isn’t surprising at all that Mr. Douglas M.’s answers had to use so many big words and abstract phrasing themselves (“fulfilled a leading role,” “development of my code of morals,” “by the example they set,” “stable and stimulating household”). These answers would sound so premeditated and contrived in this context. They simply couldn’t have come out of the mouth of the 17-year-old Miss Jenny S. at that time—unless, of course, that she had been tipped off about the question and had composed and memorized her answer. In any case, in informal conversational situations, adult people of any age and of any educational level don’t speak with such high-flown vocabulary, analytic phrasing, and complex sentence structure.
But
now let’s listen to Ms. Nora Baua of Quezon City playing the role of Miss Jenny.
She chose to answer not the original question but this more grammatically
precise and forthright rephrasing that I suggested earlier: “What role did your family play in your
quest for the Binibining Pilipinas crown?”
Here's Ms. Baua’s answer playing the role of Miss Jenny S.: “My eldest sister encouraged me to join the beauty contest and even accompanied me to the office of the organizers to give moral support. And once my mother knew that I was one of the finalists, she encouraged me by reminding me not to eat junk food and to always to eat fresh fruits and vegetables and to drink eight glasses of water every day. My father was the last to know that I joined. Would you believe he announced the news of my candidacy to my tiyas [aunts] and tiyos [uncles] and other relatives and asked all of them to pray for me?”
Hands down, I think this is the best and most sensible answer from among those who took my challenge to play the role of Miss Jenny in that situation. Ms. Baua expressed it in the simple, spontaneous, no-frills, and no-nonsense English that we would normally expect from a woman of Miss Jenny’s age at that time, and I have a feeling that Miss Jenny herself might have answered in the same measure if only the question posed to her had been phrased more clearly and precisely.
Part 4 - “Two very well-phrased but largely abstract and tangential answers” (April 19, 2008)
I would like to express my sincere appreciation to the three readers of my Manila Times column who took my challenge to answer the faulty question that had stumped finalist Miss Jenny S. during the 2008 Binibining Pilipinas contest. All three of them—Mr. Juanito F., 73, of West Virginia; Mr. Douglas M., 45, of New Jersey; and Ms. Nora Baua, 50-something, of Quezon City—demonstrated very high levels of English proficiency in their respective letters to me.
However, as I showed in Part 3, I think only Ms. Baua was able to play the role of Ms. Jean S. credibly and convincingly. She used the simple, no-nonsense English that we normally would expect from a 17-year-old college-educated woman.
As to the two gentlemen playing the role of Miss Jean S., each gave very well-phrased but largely abstract and tangential answers—answers too mature and calculating to have been given by Miss Jenny S. herself off the cuff. I believe, though, that the inappropriateness of their answers was due not so much to their inability to transcend their own level of intelligence and maturity as to the faulty nature of the question itself: “What role did your family play to you as candidate to Binibining Pilipinas?”
Along these lines, I would like to share with readers excerpts from my reply to Mr. Juanito F. when he expressed discomfort over my evaluation of this answer that he suggested Miss Jean S. should have given to that question: “My family has always been supportive of me and has always encouraged me to pursue my interest in life.”
Here are the excerpts of my reply to Mr. Juanito F.:
“Dear Juanito:
“The
vague, nonspecific nature of your answer is no reflection of your English
proficiency, in much the same way that the fumbling answer of Miss Jenny S. was
in my mind not a reflection of her own English proficiency. It was simply that
the question that was posed to her was a clumsy, highly unfocused test
instrument. Had it been constructed clearly and unequivocally, I’m sure that it
could have elicited a much more specific, sensible response from her or any
adequately English-proficient person under the same stressful conditions.
“In particular, one well-focused construction of that question is this proactive version: ‘How did your family influence your decision to join the Bb. Pilipinas contest?’ Another is this reactive version: ‘How did your family react to your decision to join the Bb. Pilipinas contest?’
“A good test instrument for measuring intelligence and articulateness seeks particular and specific information from the mind of the person being tested. This is why I think that such vague, mind-twisting questions as “What role did somebody play to you?” are best confined to take-home or hour-long written academic tests so the person being tested will have lots of time to parse it and compose a decent and realistic answer. It definitely shouldn’t be asked of nervous 17-year-olds in “the world stage” as you call it, for the bumbling answers they would usually elicit are bound not only to embarrass the program sponsors but unnecessarily rile the viewing and listening public and—as had happened in Miss Jenny’s case—sometimes make a lynching mob out of some of them.
“Now, see how felicitously the first question matches this modified version of the specific, more information-laden answer for Miss Jenny that you yourself offered the second time around: ‘To be honest, given the inadequacy of my English, I didn’t want to join the contest, but my family twisted my arm to be in it. How could I refuse when they were at it nonstop for many days and nights.’
“On the other hand, the reactive-mode question I constructed above to ask Miss Jean might have elicited this answer: ‘Oh, my, they scolded me so violently for wanting to be an exhibitionist that I thought I’d die. They were so insistent that I just focus on my Mass Communication studies and get a decent degree. But gee, I wanted to be a beauty queen and nothing would stop me! I pestered them 24/7 and got their permission in the end.’
“Either
of these answers surely would have brought the house down during the 2008 Bb.
Pilipinas finals, and you and I as well as thousands of other Filipinos
wouldn’t be at loggerheads today debating the merits and demerits of the matter."
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This article is a condensation of a series of four weekly columns that I wrote in The Manila Times in 2008 following the public uproar over the fumbling performance of a Binibining Pilipinas finalist during the live English-language Q&A portion of the competition.
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