A survey of the educational system of the Philippine islands by the Board of educational survey, created under acts 3162 and 3196 of the Philippine Legislature.

MEASUREMENT OF INSTRUCTION

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How Do Filipino and American Children Compare in
Word Pronunciation?
The Gates' Word Tests, given to 2,524 children, provide an interesting and important comparison of American and Filipino achievements
in the elementary school. The tests were scored in two ways. First,
they were scored in accordance with Gates' instructions. He says in
his directions, "Disregard slight peculiarities of pronunciation. If he
(the pupil) habitually mispronounces it (a word) because of the influence of training in a foreign tongue, a dialect, etc., that does not
matter for our purposes."
Ignoring all dialectic sound mutations and marking incorrect only
these words so completely mispronounced as to insure unintelligibility
the results presented in Figure 12 were secured. Scoring the tests a
second time and deducting, of 1 point for each sound mutation gave
the median scores which are presented on Figure 13. On each figure
the average achievements of American children are presented.
The analysis has brought out two facts of supreme importance. The
first is that the testing establishes beyond question the linguistic capacity
of the Filipino child. Starting with a very poor achievement in the
first two grades, his skill grows rapidly with succeeding years of instruction. On the basis of the Gates' scoring his pronunciation of words
in English lags about a year behind that of the American child in all
the elementary grades. On the basis of a more rigorous scoring he
is about two years behind. In each case, however, he grows steadily
and rapidly through six years of schooling in ability to pronounce
English words. The figures also establish in a conclusive way that
the teachers of Manila succeed in producing a type of spoken English
in the primary grades that is markedly superior to that used in the
provinces. The result is another exhibit of the central importance of
surrounding teachers and children with correctly spoken English.
Thousands of English-speaking people are concentrated in Manila and
more than a hundred English-speaking teachers.
The second fundamental conclusion which emerges from the statistical results of the testing is that two years of schooling is insufficient to
produce a sound command of oral English. A way must be found
to keep Filipino children in school at least four years. This finding
confirms emphatically the conclusion from the measurement of reading
ability. It presses home the seriousness of the inadequate holding power
of the school.
The measurement, therefore, although consisting of only a very small
sample of the total school population, is of the utmost significance.
Nothing is more fundamental to the development of a common language