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Legislating National Language Courses: Building the Case and the Coalition for
Filipino as a Required Subject in Philippine Colleges and Universities

Preprint · June 2020

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.29256.96007

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Legislating National Language Courses: Building the Case and the Coalition for Filipino as
a Required Subject in Philippine Colleges and Universities

David Michael M. San Juan1

Abstract:
On March 2019, the Philippine Supreme Court threw out the petition filed in 2015 against the
abolition of Filipino Language (Filipino) – the country’s national language – and Panitikan
(Literature) as required subjects in all tertiary-level institutions. Advocates succeeded in
jumpstarting the process to legislate the said subjects as curricular requirements through House
Bill 223 which six representatives of national partylist groups in the Philippine Congress filed on
July 1, 2019. The bill barely moved for 6 months, garnering just another co-author, and it is still
without any parallel version in the Philippine Senate. This paper is aimed at presenting strong
arguments to help convince legislators and the general public in throwing their weight behind the
said vital piece of legislation, and hence build the case and the coalition necessary for its passage.

Keywords: Language policy, language education, Filipino language, language legislation,

Philippine higher education

Introduction
Language policy in a neo/postcolonial context is most of the times messy and/or problematic,
especially in multingual societies like the Philippines. In 1996, after decades of slow yet advancing
Filipinization endeavors, mandatory Filipino subjects became part of the General Education
Curriculum in college. These mandatory subjects were scrapped and declared optional when the
new General Education Curriculum was implemented via CHED Memorandum Order (CMO) No.
20, Series of 2013. Language advocates led by the Alyansa ng mga Tagapagtanggol ng Wikang
Filipino/Alliance of Defenders of the Filipino Language/Tanggol Wika/Defend Language –
arguing that abolishing Filipino as a required subject is unconstitutional – filed a petition to stop
the said memorandum’s implementation (Lumbera et al., 2015). On March 2019, the Philippine

1
Professor, Filipino Department, De La Salle University-Manila; Lead Convener, Alyansa ng Mga Tagapagtanggol ng
Wikang Filipino (Tanggol Wika); President, Pambansang Samahan sa Linggwistika at Literaturang Filipino; Former
Vice Head, National Committee on Language and Translation (NCLT) under the National Commission for Culture and
the Arts (NCCA)
Supreme Court threw out the petition against the abolition of Filipino Language (Filipino) – the
country’s national language – and Panitikan (Literature) as required subjects in all tertiary-level
institutions. The legal challenge to the said educational policy was strong enough for the High
Court to issue a temporary restraining order (TRO) which halted the policy’s implementation for
almost 5 years, before the court reversed itself. Nevertheless, the High Court emphasized that
universities can still offer Filipino and Panitikan as optional subjects. Critics argue that such
optional status is in fact a death sentence to the said subjects, pointing out to preliminary data that
show many universities have instantly abolished the subjects as mandatory courses or reduced
units for, upon hearing news of the High Court’s final decision on the matter. Filipino and
Panitikan may soon unfortunately suffer the same fate that befall the Spanish language which was
abolished as a mandatory subject in Philippine universities in 1987, but nevertheless retained its
status as a favored foreign language, albeit on a voluntary basis as mentioned in Article XIV of
the Philippine Constitution. Few universities offer Spanish as an elective nowadays, and even
fewer students are voluntarily taking it up as a subject. Informed by such historical lesson,
advocates jumpstarted the process to legislate Filipino and Panitikan as curricular requirements
through House Bill 223 which six representatives of national partylist groups in Congress (ACT
Teachers, Bayan Muna, Gabriela, and Kabataan) filed on July 1, 2019. The bill is backed by a
petition2 led by Tanggol Wika. However, the bill barely moved in Congress for 6 months,
garnering just another co-author, and it is still without any parallel version in the Philippine Senate.
(NOTE: FIGURES AND TABLES ETC. IN THE APPENDICES: p.17-26)

Objectives of the paper

This paper is aimed at presenting selected strong arguments to help build a strong case and hence
possibly help build the broad coalition needed to legislate House Bill 223. The first part of the
paper will focus on describing and analyzing existing language policy and related issues (such as
dismal student scores in national and international tests). The second part of the paper will review
constitutional language provisions. The third part would focus on the arguments in favor of
Filipino as a required subject in college. This segment hopes to build the case for Filipino subjects.
Arguments will be discussed vis-à-vis related constitutional provisions and existing national

2
See https://www.change.org/p/philippine-house-of-representatives-isabatas-ang-house-bill-223-filipino-at-
panitikan-sa-kolehiyo
policies. Furthermore, arguments that will help build and broaden the coalition for the passage of
House Bill 223 will be emphasized.

Actual Language Policy vis-à-vis Dismal Test Scores in the Philippines

Results of both national and international tests point out to the weakness of the current curricula,
which requires improvement beyond basic education. At face value, the results of the Programme
for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2018 – which “examines what students know in
reading, mathematics and science” (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development/OECD, 2018a) seem to be not related to language policy, but a closer look at the
details would yield a more nuanced analysis. Figure 1 shows the Philippines ranked last in a list
of 79 countries that participated in PISA 2018, which focused on the average reading scores of
pupils/students. The OECD’s country note for the Philippines gives this summary on such dismal
performance (Besa, 2019): “Fifteen-year-old students in the Philippines scored lower in reading,
mathematics and science than those in most of the countries and economies that participated in
PISA 2018. The country’s average score in reading was 340 score points, on a par with that of the
Dominican Republic. No country scored lower than the Philippines and the Dominican
Republic…Over 80% of students in the Philippines did not reach a minimum level of proficiency
in reading, which is one of the largest shares of low performers amongst all PISA-participating
countries and economies.” The same country note gives a clear hint on what went wrong in the
Philippines: “Expenditure per student in the Philippines was the lowest amongst all PISA-
participating countries/economies – and 90% lower than the OECD average… Some 94% of 15-
year-old students in the Philippines speak a language other than the test language (i.e. English) at
home most of the time. This was the second highest percentage amongst all PISA-participating
countries/economies.” While acknowledging that expenditure on education is a factor that affects
performance, the current paper will of course focus on the problem with the discrepancy between
the test language (English) which Philippine authorities chose and the language used and spoken
in students’ homes (non-English, Philippine languages).
The reading test questions for PISA 2018 were originally in English but countries can choose to
take the test in their own non-English languages too. There were 17 English versions of the test
for the countries or territories in List 1. Meanwhile, 62 countries took the exam either in English
and in other non-English languages, or solely, in non-English languages. There are 94 non-English
language versions of the test, in 49 non-English languages in List 2. For regional comparison,
Tables 1 & 2 can offer some preliminary insights. These tables show many East and Southeast
Asian countries/territories and high-ranking countries used non-English languages for PISA 2018.
Meanwhile, Philippine authorities stubbornly used English for PISA 2018 despite the fact that
recent National Achievement Tes (NAT) results suggest students lack a high level of competency
in English. As stated in the PISA 2018 National Report of the Philippines, the Department of
Education/DepEd (2018) ignored those NAT results, and instead insisted that the “prevailing
policy…i.e. DepEd Order No. 31, s. 2012 (Policy Guidelines on the Implementation of Grades 1
to 10 of the K to 12 Basic Education Curriculum Effective School Year 2012-2013) specifies that
the language of instruction is English for the concerned learning areas,” while pointing out that
“(t)he test assumes that the test-takers should have reached a sufficient level of understanding in
English to work on the PISA test without encountering linguistic problems.” It turns out, most of
the Filipino pupils/students encountered linguistic problems as they lack a sufficient level of
understanding in English.
Those who think that the typical Filipino high school student’s grasp of both English and Filipino
will be enough for them to become academically capable of using English and Filipino, should be
reminded that the government’s own data (see Figures 2 & 3) prove that high school students’
language competencies need improvement, to say the least. Hence, considering that in the 2017
NAT results, high school students got better scores for Filipino, than in English, Philippine
authorities would have had second thoughts on using English as the sole language of testing for
PISA 2018. Looking at NAT trends, especially the figures for 2017, it is clear that scores for both
Filipino and English are subpar, considering that 75 is the DepEd standard passing score, but the
same data will also yield the fact that, pupils/students would have better PISA 2018 scores if
DepEd used Filipino and/or other Philippine languages, rather than English, as the language of
testing. This debacle of intertwined test results is partly caused by a convoluted actual language
policy which deviates from what the official (and in this case, logical) policy should be. Legislation
to retain and strengthen national language subjects in college will be a good start in resolving this
problem. It is now necessary to review current language policy vis-à-vis constitutional provisions.
Review of Constitutional Language Provisions: Legal and Moral Grounds for Legislation
Since 2013, the Mother Tongue Based-Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE) was introduced along
with the K to 12 program. Such language policy in basic education requires schools to teach the
dominant mother tongue/s of students as a subject and use it as a medium of instruction too, from
Grades 1 to 3. This in turn reduced teaching hours for English and Filipino in the said grade levels.
Meanwhile, the Bilingual Education Policy (BEP) was retained from Grade 4 onwards – which
means English and Filipino will still be taught as subjects and used as medium of instruction too.
Under the BEP, English is the preferred medium of instruction for Science, Mathematics and
Technology subjects. Meanwhile, Filipino is the preferred medium of instruction for Social
Sciences, Values Education etc. As per recent studies, MTB-MLE is already causing problems, if
not troubles, in basic education (Monje et al., 2019; Burton, 2013; Tupas, 2014; Cruz, 2015).
Indeed, NAT scores for English and Filipino have reached lower levels after K to 12’s
implementation, as a result of a language policy that contradicts the Constitution (Alicias, 2015).
Article XIV, Section 6 and Section 7 of the Philippine Constitution gives a clear picture of what
the official language policy should be. The last portion of Section 6 gives Congress the duty and
the powers to expand the use of the national language. Furthermore, it means anything that has
been jumpstarted should be sustained, rather than reversed – hence the abolition of formerly
required Filipino subjects in college is not only regressive but also against the spirit of the
Constitution. In this context, the Philippine government initiated and sustained the teaching of
Filipino as a subject in college at the national level through the General Education Curriculum
outlined in CMO No. 59, Series of 1996 and CMO No. 04, Series of 1997, requiring all college
students to take up 6-9 units of Filipino subjects and 3-6 units of Panitikan. Through Executive
Order (EO) No. 210, series of 2003, the Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo administration attempted to
circumvent the Constitution’s language provisions by decreeing the imposition of English as the
primary medium of instruction in all public and private institutions of learning in the secondary
level, and the prioritization of English as the primary medium of instruction in the tertiary level. It
was eventually scrapped as official policy, when the K to 12 Law nominally reinstated BEP (albeit
tilted towards English dominance). Hence, just like EO No. 210, CMO No. 20, Series of 2013 that
abolishes Filipino and Panitikan as mandatory subjects in college, is clearly an act of stopping,
rescinding, minimizing, or reversing what has been initiated in 1996 and sustained until 2013, an
act which disregards the Constitution’s language provisions.
The first segment of Section 7 emphasizes the primacy of the national language over English –
something which is yet to be realized/concretized in actual educational policy. Perspectives and
transcripts from the Constitutional Commission (ConCom) that produced the Philippines’ current
Constitution can further shed light on these matters. Constitutional Commissioner Dr. Wilfrido
Villacorta and eminent linguist Dr. Andrew Gonzalez (2001) that the ConCom gave a clear,
provisional and “diminishing role” for English as an official language. In a separate scholarly
work, Dr. Gonzalez (1988) further explained the 1987 Constitution’s granting of primary official
language status to Filipino vis-a-vis the secondary official language status of English, as a
progressive process that is expected to expand “the domains of Filipino…in our social lives and in
our education system,” as the space for English contracts – summed up in the addage “Filipino
must increase and English must decrease.” Forward-looking ConCom delegates fully understood
that English is meant to be a merely secondary language, while Filipino is the primary official
language. Commissioner Jose Nolledo (Constitutional Commission of 1986, 1986) emphasized
English’s status as an official language is clearly transitional as it is meant to be fully supplanted
by Filipino as the primary official language, rather than the other way around. Likewise,
Commissioner Jaime Tadeo (Constitutional Commission of 1986, 1986), a peasant leader, spoke
on behalf of people’s and nationalist organizations in supporting Filipino as the primary language,
and rightly relegating English into a secondary status. The second segment of Section 7 emphasizes
that other Philippine languages are auxiliary languages of instruction – a provision which
educational policymakers disregarded when they instantly converted those languages into primary
medium of instruction from Grades 1 to 3. Taken as a whole, the abolition of Filipino in college,
the clear dominance of English in the BEP, and the reduction of Filipino’s teaching hours in Grades
1 to 3, constitute a triple whammy for the national language in the Philippine curriculum. It is
national tragedy that can still be reversed through legislative action, which, in a country like the
Philippines, can only be fast-tracked if there is public pressure for Congress to fulfill its duty.

Building the Broad-Based Advocacy Coalition for House Bill 223

The overview on constitutional language provisions prove that there is enough legal and moral
grounds for the re-opening of the status of Filipino as a required subject in college, especially in
the halls of Congress where House Bill 223 has been pending for several months now. As House
Bill 223 is controversial and has potential powerful oppositors, passing it would require building
and expanding an advocacy coalition with broad-based constituencies. It is in this context that the
Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) can aid in this long-winded process. Drawing on the works
of Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith, Elgin and Weible (2013), explained that “(t)he ACF was developed
in the 1980s to provide a synthesis of top-down and bottom-up approaches in the implementation
literature; an approach for understanding coalitions, learning, and policy change…” The current
research is parallel to what they call as an ACF-guided stakeholder analysis that “is more
descriptive than explanatory,” in discussing “coalition members, beliefs, networks, resources, and
strategies.” The only difference is that, in their research, the coalition is already in place and they
conducted what amounts to a post-advocacy analysis. In the current paper, the researcher is
attempting to describe who/what constituencies can be assembled into a broad-based advocacy
coalition for the purpose of campaigning for and hopefully shepherding House Bill 223 into
becoming a Republic Act. Hence, the arguments in favor of this advocacy will be welded and
wielded to attract and persuade these allies and constituencies into supporting this bill. For
policymakers, especially legislators who are expected to be attuned with their constituents’ needs,
especially those articulated in the Constitution, such discussion will offer added impetus in pushing
for House Bill 223.

Five Key Arguments and Big Constituencies for the Passage of House Bill 223
Retaining Filipino as a subject in college will generate jobs and expand professional
development for thousands of Filipino teachers, BSE Filipino students and other related
professions. This of course serves the bill’s core constituency – the major prospective beneficiaries
of House Bill 223 – Filipino teachers and BSE Filipino majors. The National Committee on
Language Translation/NCLT under the National Commission for Culture and the Arts/NCCA
(2014) says the abolition of Filipino as a mandatory subject in college affected or displaced at least
10,000 full-time and 20,000 part-time faculty members. Most of the part-time faculty members are
now permanently displaced, while many of the full-time faculty members have been forced to
retrain/retool to teach at senior high school and/or another tertiary-level subject, compelling CHED
to issue a “MEMORANDUM FROM THE OFFICE OF THE CHAIRMAN” with the subject:
“SUBMISSION OF LIST OF HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTION FACULTY TEACHING
FILIPINO AND PANITIKAN GENERAL EDUCATION COURSES AS OF THE PRECEDING
TERM” dated “30 July 2019.” The said memorandum requires all universities to submit such list
which indicates the number of personnel who will be displaced or have been displaced by the full
implementation of CMO No. 20, Series of 2013, albeit, starting only from Term 1 of Academic
Year 2019-2020. Legislating Filipino as a subject in college will surely have a positive impact on
these displaced teachers. The bill will also create additional career opportunities for other Filipino
teachers and BSE Filipino majors. There are 880,000 public school teachers (Rey, 2018),
approximately 117,300 of whom are Filipino teachers (author’s estimates based on number of
subjects from Kinder to Senior High School). Using recent Licensure Examination for
Teachers/LET passing rates (ABS-CBN News, 2019), this researcher estimates that our education
system is capable of training more or less 38,000 elementary teachers (who are technically
qualified and allowed to teach Filipino) and more or less 4,000 Filipino secondary teachers every
year – teachers who could have additional career options if they pursue graduate studies and if
House Bill 223 is passed. Indirectly, this will also create and/or retain hundreds of jobs at
publishing houses and printing presses that cater to tertiary institutions.
Filipino is the language of political democratization, thus House Bill 223 is a major vehicle of
multisectoral consciousness-raising and a clear concretization of the Constitution’s democratic
goals. Progressive political groups – mostly Non-Government Organizations, People’s
Organizations etc. see value and utility in strengthening the language of the masses as a national
language for public communication and socially-relevant research. Filipino is now the
undisputable language of popular media, both in print (as shown by the mass readership of a
plethora of Filipino language tabloids, versus the dwindling subscriptions of English broadsheets),
radio (as proven by the wholesale Filipinization of both AM and FM stations now), and television
(as evident in the Filipino language dominance in primetime, from noontime shows to evening
news and serial dramas or “teleseryes” including foreign ones dubbed in Filipino). Majority of the
respondents in a recent national survey of the Commission for the Filipino Language/KWF (2014),
covering areas in Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao, say that they use Filipino in daily communication
(Delima, 2017). Then (Maceda, c.1997 and Atienza, 1992) and now, Filipino is the language of
social movements in the country as proven by activist archives such as www.arkibongbayan.org,
news sites like www.pinoyweekly.org, and policy think tanks like www.ibon.org. Hence,
legislating Filipino as subject in college will certainly broaden and deepen the use of the national
language as a potent vehicle of progressive, socially-conscious, and reform-oriented public
discourse, by training and molding citizens who are capable of using their national language for
desired social transformation, beyond the language’s current dominance in popular media.
Filipino’s intellectualization in various disciplines should be encouraged and expanded to
ensure that our professionals are able to communicate with the public whom they serve, and are
capable of gathering data and conducting research relevant to the needs of our communities.
Mainstream professional organizations and even public agencies are interested in expanding and
deepening the intellectualization of Filipino in their various disciplines and professions. For
example, the current COVID-19 pandemic compelled the Department of Health (DOH) via its
eloquent Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire to utilize Filipino in its public briefings (Tanggol
Wika, 2020). The Philippine Council for Health Research and Development encourages medical
researchers to use Filipino to help “achieve better health for every Filipino” (Razal, 2018). As a
reaction to the aftermath of typhoon Yolanda, the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and
Astronomical Services Administration/PAG-ASA and the KWF published “Patnubay sa Weder
Forkast” (Guide on Weather Forecast), “a glossary of meteorological terms in Filipino to help
more people understand weather forecasts more easily” (De Roque and Esquejo, 2015). Disciplinal
organizations such as the Pambansang Samahan sa Sikolohiyang Pilipino/PSSP officially
promotes the use of Philippine languages in researches on Philippine culture, society, and
psychology (PSSP, 2020a), through its dominantly Filipino academic journal, DIWA E-Journal
(PSSP, 2020b). Similarly, the now Scopus-listed Kritike: An Online Journal of Philosophy of the
Department of Philosophy, University of Santo Tomas (2020), encourages Filipinization by
accepting both English and Filipino submissions. Meanwhile, the group Advocates of Science and
Technology for the People (Samahan ng Nagtataguyod ng Agham at Teknolohiya Para sa
Sambayanan) or AGHAM regularly publishes materials that use Filipino to explain highly
technical concepts like national industrialization (AGHAM, 2017), or provides technical help in
NGOs that write about issues such as climate change (Kalikasan People’s Network for the
Environment, 2008). These professional endeavors could be further expanded and brought to the
center of every Filipino citizen’s academic training upon the passage of House Bill 223.
Filipino as a subject in college will be a broad academic space that includes and nurtures other
Philippine languages and cultures. Contrary to popular belief, rather than focusing on just the
national language, the syllabi prepared by Tanggol Wika for proposed new Filipino subjects in
college incorporate the teaching and learning of other Philippine languages with a plethora of
readings towards such goal (Ilao, 2012; Teodoro, 2015; Pasatiempo and Castronuevo, 2016;
Dulawan, 2009; Asenjo, 2011; San Juan, 2018). In a related position paper, the Filipino
Department of Ateneo de Manila University (2014) emphasized that the abolition of Filipino’s
academic space in college will also marginalize regional languages and cultures which are natural
components of Filipino as a discipline in higher education. The “Father of Contemporary West
Visayan Literature” (Villa, 2019), Leoncio P. Deriada (1995), expounded on the vital and
complementary role of regional languages in further developing the national language. The
intertwined political and cultural necessity of shaping and deepening national identity through a
national language that nurtures all local languages and cultures has been eloquently laid down in
the position paper written by the Department of Filipino and Other Languages at Mindanao State
University-Iligan Institute of Technology (2014), a leading university situated in a multilingual,
multireligious, and multi-cultural city in Southern Philippines, whose top administrators also
voluntarily retained required Filipino subjects in all their course offerings. Thus, legislating the
national language as a requirement in college will institutionalize an academic space that includes
and nurtures all Philippine languages and cultures, a necessary act in a post/neo-colonial society.
Improving the competency of students in using Filipino as a language of research would
broaden and deepen our country’s research capacity and eventually increase our collective
research productivity too. Research productivity is a necessary ingredient of economic
development (Zaman et al., 2018; Blanco et al., 2013). Article XIV, Section 10 of the Constitution
echoes such social relevance of research in a developing country. Research is as among the “main
functions of the higher education sector” (CHED, 2009). Thus, improvement of research
productivity is, unquestionably, a national aspiration. This aspiration should be emphasized
considering that regionally (in Southeast Asia) – and even more, internationally – the Philippines
lags behind its developed and developing neighbors (Figures 4 to 6). As a result, the country’s
academic institutions could become second-tier or even third-tier within the ASEAN (Tan, 2019).
Many researchers in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam have an innate advantage as
bilinguals who can do research both in English and in their own languages, and whose academic
circles nurture journals that publish in their own languages (Figures 7 & 8), unlike typical Filipino
academics who can only write in English in a country where few journals publish articles written
in the local languages (Figure 9), in contrast with the hundreds, even thousands of local language
journals in other Southeast Asian countries. Demeterio and Felicilda (2015) back the need for
further Filipinization by tackling how “Filipino strengthens our research capacity,” and by pointing
out that Filipinos have more interest in reading and downloading researches in Filipino, rather than
in English. Researches in Filipino have a stronger, actual impact (measured in terms of local
communities’ engagement with research). The most read academic journal in the Philippines is a
journal that publishes solely in Filipino – De La Salle University’s MALAY
(Conscious/Consciousness) and it is the only all-Filipino language journal in the top 10 (Figure
10). Beyond research productivity and impact, Guillermo (2016) notes the importance of
developing the country’s “autonomous/independent discourse” (or “independent”) through the
more frequent, accelerated, and continuous interactions between academics and researchers who
are mostly capable of using Filipino and other local languages to discover or create “many original
concepts, theories, approaches, methods, and problems” that are relevant to the country’s context
and to its myriad of communities. Researches written and disseminated in Filipino would be the
Filipino academics’ contribution to ensuring that our own “ways of understanding the world”
(Huttner-Koros, 2015) don’t fade away, but are instead rediscovered and utilized in all relevant
means. As Philippine university administrators fail to see the need to retain Filipino and Panitikan
as mandatory core subjects in college, the country’s Congress and Senate should take the initiative
to legislate the status of these subjects through House Bill 223. This will just be a preliminary step
in expanding and deepening the social relevance of the country’s higher education curriculum
again, after it was recently disastrously trimmed down (San Juan, 2016). As Pante (2020) notes,
“the marginalization of Filipino” in the new college curriculum “is just one part of the massive
restructuring of basic education and tertiary institutions.” It is a marginalization that should be
reversed, and a restructuring that must be reshaped to closely align with the country’s
constitutional goals and aspirations, which clearly include a strong, vibrant national language
nurtured as an academic discipline in all levels of education, more especially in higher education.

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APPENDICES
Figure 1
PISA 2018 Results

Source: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development/OECD, 2018c.

Figure 2
Four-Year Trend of the National Achievement Test Grade 6 Results

Source: Department of Education, 2017.

Figure 3
Four-Year Trend of the National Achievement Test Grade 10 Results

Source: Department of Education, 2017.

Figure 4
Selected Southeast Asian Countries’ Number of Academic Journals in the Directory of Open Access
Journals (DOAJ)3

Singapore 1,596

Viet Nam 62

Indonesia 173,726

Malaysia 6,324

Thailand 4,942

Philippines 2,151

0 20,000 40,000 60,000 80,000 100,000 120,000 140,000 160,000 180,000 200,000

Source: Directory of Open Access Journals, 2020 (for the raw data).

Figure 5
Selected Southeast Asian Countries’ Number of Academic Documents Produced (1996-2018)

Source: ScimagoLab, 2019 (for the figure); Scopus (for the data).

3
Database consulted on 09 January 2020.
Figure 6
Selected Southeast Asian Countries’ Number of Journal Article Produced (1 October 2018 - 30
September 2019)

Singapore 1,206

Viet Nam 79

Indonesia 62

Malaysia 150

Thailand 234

Philippines 42

0 200 400 600 800 1,000 1,200 1,400

Source: Springer Nature Limited, 2020 (for the raw data).

Figure 7
Number of Journals in the DOAJ That Publish in Selected Southeast Asian Languages 4

Vietnamese 2
Indonesian 1,298
Malay 21
Thai 5
Tagalog 4

0 200 400 600 800 1,000 1,200 1,400

Source: DOAJ, 2020 (for the raw data).

4
Language names in this figure were adopted as they appeared in the DOAJ database.
Figure 8
Number of Journal Articles in the DOAJ Written in Selected Southeast Asian Languages5

Vietnamese 0

Indonesian 142,726

Malay 921

Thai 404

Tagalog 318

0 20,000 40,000 60,000 80,000 100,000 120,000 140,000 160,000

Source: DOAJ, 2020 (for the raw data).

Figure 9
Number of Journals (Per Country) in the ASEAN Citation Index With Local Names (A Good Predictor
of Policy of Accepting Non-English Submissions)6

Viet Nam 4

Indonesia 71

Malaysia 9

Thailand 129

Philippines 3

0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140

Source: ASEAN Citation Index, 2020. (for the raw data).

5
Language names in this figure were adopted as they appeared in the DOAJ database.
6
The author culled the raw data from a downloadable Excel file from the ASEAN Citation Index (ACI) website on 09
January 2020. The said file contains information on 596 journals, from which the current research’s figure of 216
journals with local names was sourced. The author checked the websites and submission policies of at least 20 of
these journals and all those checked do indeed accept submissions in the country of origin’s local language. A more
comprehensive manual check of every journal in the ACI will be good as it will probably yield more journals
(especially in the case of Indonesa) that publish in the local languages because even some of those without local
names may in fact have the same language policy.
Figure 10

Top 10 Philippine Journals in Terms of Total Number of Visits7

MALAY 3,884,900

ANI: LETRAN CALAMBA RESEARCH REPORT 2,111,709

THE JOURNAL OF HISTORY 1,384,699

THE ASIA-PACIFIC EDUCATION RESEARCHER 954,020

PHILIPPINE JOURNAL OF PSYCHOLOGY 910,016

DLSU BUSINESS & ECONOMICS REVIEW 856,216

ASIA PACIFIC JOURNAL OF MULTIDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH 848,352

INTERNATIONAL RICE RESEARCH NOTES 845,780

ASIA-PACIFIC SOCIAL SCIENCE REVIEW 817,613

PHILIPPINE JOURNAL OF VETERINARY AND ANIMAL SCIENCES 720,423

0 1,000,000 2,000,000 3,000,000 4,000,000

Source: KITE E-Learning Solutions, 2020 (for the raw data).

7
As of 11 January 2020
List 1
Countries/Territories that Used an English Version of the Questionnaire for PISA 2018
1. Australia
2. Brunei
3. Canada
4. Cyprus
5. Ireland
6. Macao-China
7. Malta
8. Malaysia
9. New Zealand
10. Philippines
11. Qatar
12. Singapore
13. Sweden
14. United Kingdom (Scotland)
15. United Kingdom (excluding Scotland)
16. United Arab Emirates
17. United States.
Source: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 2018a.
List 2
Non-English Languages Used in Versions of the Questionnaire for PISA 2018
1. Albanian
2. Arabic
3. Azerbaijani
4. South Azerbaijani
5. Basque
6. Belarusian
7. Bokmål
8. Bosnian
9. Bulgarian
10. Catalan
11. Chinese
12. Croatian
13. Czech
14. Danish
15. Dutch
16. Estonian
17. Faroese
18. Finnish
19. French
20. Galician
21. Georgian
22. German
23. Greek
24. Hebrew
25. Hungarian
26. Icelandic
27. Indonesian
28. Irish
29. Italian
30. Japanese
31. Kazakh
32. Korean
33. Latvian
34. Lithuanian
35. Malay
 36. Montenegrin
37. Nynorsk
38. Polish
39. Portuguese
40. qar
41. Russian
42. Serb
43. Slovak
44. Slovenian
45. Spanish
46. Swedish
47. Thai
48. Turkish
49. Welsh
Source: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 2018a

Table 1
Languages That East and Southeast Asian Countries/Territories Used for PISA 2018 Tests
Country/Territory English Non-English
Brunei Yes No
Indonesia No Indonesian
Malaysia Yes Malay
Philippines Yes No
Singapore Yes No
Thailand No Thai
China No Chinese
Hong Kong No Chinese
Japan No Japanese
Macau Yes Chinese
Portuguese
South Korea No Korean
Taiwan No Chinese
Source: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 2018b.
 Table 2
Languages That Top 20 Countries/Territories Used for PISA 2018 Tests
Country/Territory English Non-English
China No Chinese
Singapore Yes No
Macau Yes Chinese
Portuguese
Hong Kong No Chinese
Estonia No Estonian
Russian
Canada Yes French
Finland No Finnish
Swedish
Ireland Yes Irish
Korea No Korean
Poland No Polish
Sweden Yes Swedish
New Zealand Yes No
United States Yes No
United Kingdom Yes Welsh
Japan No Japanese
Australia Yes No
Taiwan No Chinese
Denmark No Danish
Faroese
Norway No Bokmål
Nynorsk
Germany No German
Source: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 2018b.

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