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2018 ATTITUDES OF ENGLISH TEACHERS TOWARD PHILENGLISH (1)

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RESEARCH ARTICLE Adv. Sci. Lett. 24 (11), 8349-8352

Copyright © 2018 American Scientific Publishers Advanced Science Letters

All rights reserved November, 2018
Printed in the United States of America

Attitudes of Filipino English Teachers Toward

21st Century Philippine English Writing
Leah Gustilo1 and Nimfa Dimaculangan2

1
De La Salle University, 2401 Taft Avenue, Manila, Philippines; 2 Laguna State Polytechnic University, Laguna, Philippines

The present study is part of a larger study which seeks to produce a wordlist of early 21st century Philippine English (henceforth PhilE)
lexicon and determine the attitude of ESL teachers toward Philippine English variety. A Subsample of 99 lexical items culled from a
newly built 400,000-word corpus of early 21st century Philippine English written texts were presented to 200 English teachers from 15
state and private universities in Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao islands of the Philippines. The acceptability test revealed negative
attitude towards the Philippine English lexicon. Out of the 99 lexical items subjected to acceptability test, only five were accepted for
formal writing and only two were accepted for informal writing. Not even one of the lexical items was accepted for formal oral context,
and only 33 were accepted for use in informal oral contexts. Twenty were judged unacceptable PhilE lexicon for use in any of the four
given domains. These findings revealed that many ESL teachers are still unaware of the existence of the Philippine English variety and
the concept of World Englishes which may have caused their indifference to the sociolinguistic reality of Philippine English and their
negative attitude to specific Philippine English lexes. The present study clearly suggests that PhilE is very much alive and its lexicon is
growing; however, gatekeepers of standard English usage such as ESL teachers hold negative attitude towards it, and they are
unwilling to accept PhilE neologisms particularly those code-mixed with Tagalog elements. If nativization or linguistic independence
is the goal of PhilE stakeholders, ESL teaching should be extended to the teaching of PhilE and language awareness. Both teachers and
students should be aware of the word building phenomena in New Englishes and their implications to the learning of several varieties.

Keywords: Philippine English lexicon, nativization, neologisms, New Englishes

1. INTRODUCTION or demotivate his/her students to learn the language.

The status and prestige of English in the Philippines is
linked to the Filipinos’ positive attitude towards the
language. Previous studies1 revealed that students,
parents, and teachers preferred English to Filipino as a
medium of instruction. They were convinced that English
is the language of power and upward social mobility aside
from being an intellectualized language used to source
information.
Likewise, other studies,18 although revealing
equal prestige of Filipino (then Pilipino) and English,
revealed that the Filipinos’ motivation for learning
English was instrumental. They positively saw English as
the key to education, communication, good job, and travel.
The studies also showed that teachers’ attitude towards
languages, school course, or school environment affect
students’ academic performance. Hence, a teacher’s
attitude towards the language s/he is teaching radiates in
his/her words and actions; henceforth, s/he may motivate
The findings of basically similar studies conducted
over 40 years on language use and translation
preference15, study of attitude through judging personality
from language usage1, and students’ attitude towards
English12, indicated that English is more prestigious than
Filipino language.
A study11 on Standard Filipino English (henceforth
SFE) revealed the Filipino English speakers’ positive
attitude towards Americans and their English. Llamzon’s
four (4) SFE speakers with varying commands of the
language, i.e. a college professor, a senior college student,
a college freshman, and a janitor were asked to speak in
three styles: conversational, semiformal (narrative), and
formal reading. A separate group of respondents were
asked to identify who the best representative speakers of
SFE were. The college professor and the senior college
student were identified as SFE speakers.
The acceptability of the peculiarities of SFE
speakers was verified by conducting three experiments

1
Adv. Sci. Lett. 24 (11), 8349-8352
utilizing speakers in pairs. In the first experiment, one
speaker uttered sentences, first in American English then
in formal SFE. In the second experiment, a speaker
uttered formal SFE sentence, and in the third experiment,
an American and a Filipino speakers uttered sentences in
their own styles. The experiment showed that whenever
SFE pronunciation was different from American
pronunciation, the American pronunciation was judged
more correct, more acceptable, and perfect; nevertheless,
when SFE was uttered with American pronunciation, SFE
was judged correct, perfect, and acceptable.
An important study8 conducted a simple and small
survey to gauge the general acceptability of 40 words that
seemed most questionable in terms of acceptability. It
asked 20 members of the English Language Department
of a leading private university in the country and 10
members of the Board of the Linguistic Society of the
Philippines (LSP) to check whether they would use the
selected words while speaking English at a department
meeting (for the more formal end), while chatting with
friends (for the more informal end) or whether they would
never use those words.
Simple frequency counts showed that half of the
respondents claimed they would never use what appeared
to be slang (e.g. brown in brown jokes, traffic and busted
as adjectives). The findings recorded the importance of
the formal-informal distinction and reflection on some
students’ resistance to new coinages. Nevertheless,
Bautista5 saw the moderate positive attitude of the
respondents toward SFE items. She wrote: “The glass is
half full and even high blood used as an adjective is
gaining some acceptance” (p.70).
Another attitude study was conducted in 20004.
This study described the attitudes of selected Luzon
University students and faculty towards Philippine
English. Initially, the findings pointed to the participants’
acceptance and recognition of Philippine English. A
majority of the student and faculty respondents rejected
the questionnaire’s statements that were derogatory
towards Philippine English. In addition, they reported
speaking it. Noteworthy was the generally high evaluation
given by the faculty respondents to Philippine English,
higher than the one given by their student counterparts.
The investigation revealed their awareness of the English
variety they speak which has features identifiable as
Philippine variety; however, the result was not a
manifestation that they were satisfied with the state of
affairs. Almost half of the student respondents chose
American English as the variety to be learned, while 12
percent chose British English. Only 31 percent favored
Philippine English. Relatively, over half of the faculty
respondents believed that the English Filipinos should
learn must follow exonormative standards. Teachers and
students acknowledged speaking Philippine English, but
they aspired to speak either American English or British
English, which implied that the English they spoke was
not good enough. In addition, 70 percent of the faculty,
RESEARCH ARTICLE
and 81 percent of the students believed that English
teachers should be those who are knowledgeable and
fluent in American English. Thirty-seven percent of the
students, and 23 percent of the faculty respondents agreed
that Philippine English was a mistake made by poor
speakers of English.
It was observed that studies on the lexicon of
Philippine English6 and attitude studies toward Philippine
English lexicon are scant. Hence, the present study aims
at investigating the attitude of English teachers across
Philippine regions towards 21st century Philippine English
lexical items from a newly-built corpus of Philippine
English written texts. The study investigated as to
whether the lexical items are acceptable or unacceptable
for use in Philippine English.
Acceptability refers to the degree to which users
of language judge an expression as fairly good or let its
use pass without noticing anything out of the ordinary.4
An acceptable expression is one that speakers do not
object to or do not even notice unless it is called to their
attention. It goes to say that a word or lexical item can be
judged as correct and acceptable or incorrect and
unacceptable.
2. METHODOLOGY
Research Design
The present investigation followed descriptive
research design and utilized qualitative-quantitative
mixed methodologies. Scholars14 suggest that descriptive
research is designed to gather and report information
about present and existing conditions. It involves
recording, describing, interpreting, and analyzing events
and phenomenon. It is used to obtain information
concerning current status of phenomenon to describe
what exists with respect to variables in a situation.
Qualitative data were used to come up with a new
list of Philippine lexical items according to the lexical
processes found in the existing literature. It utilized the
corpus linguistics method in building the 400,000-word
English texts from which Philippine English lexical items
were extracted. It used archival data from published
academic articles in Humanities, Social Science, Natural
Science and Technology, among others.
Quantitative data were utilized to determine the ESL
teachers’ attitude of acceptance towards Philippine
English lexicon. Specifically, they were obtained through
the use of frequency counts and percentages.
Sampling of lexical items and participants
Stratified random sampling was applied in
selecting 99 lexical items for acceptability test. Purposive
nonrandom sampling was applied in the selection of the
200 ESL teacher respondents for the attitude study, i.e.
only ESL teachers regardless of their academic ranks (e.g.
instructor, assistant professor, or associate professor)
2
RESEARCH ARTICLE
were requested to evaluate the selected lexical items for
general acceptability. These 200 respondents were
from five government universities and 10 private
universities in the country (i.e. 50 ESL teachers from five
universities in the National Capital Region (NCR); 50
ESL teachers from five universities in Luzon; 50 ESL
teachers from two universities in Vizayas; and 50 ESL
teachers from three (3) universities in Mindanao). The 50
participants from Luzon were 20-65 years old with the
modal age of 38. The 50 respondents from Visayas were
of the same age trend; the oldest was 68 years old, and the
youngest was 20 years old with the mode at 24. Majority
of the respondents from Mindanao were young; akin to
the first two groups, the oldest was 63 years old, and the
youngest was 20 years old. This was the youngest group;
25 were within the age bracket of 20-29 with the modal
age of 24. The fourth group, the ESL teachers from NCR
aged 21-63 with the modal age of 28.
Instrument
A language attitude questionnaire was prepared
based on the literature reviewed to determine the
university ESL teachers’ attitude of acceptance towards
the 99 specific Philippine English lexicon randomly
selected from the provisional wordlist extracted from the
corpus. The use of this method is supported by Romaine17
who posits that attitude towards printed language is
investigated through questionnaire.
The said questionnaire has three parts. Part I asks
for the respondents’ demographic profile and other
information related to their language background such as
age, gender, birthplace, provincial and city addresses,
mother tongue, and language/s spoken, which the
researcher used during the analysis stage. Part II consists
of fifteen-five-point Likert-Scale statements which
revealed the participants’ attitude towards Philippine
English lexicon of educated Filipinos in relation to its
development (Items numbers 6,7,10,11,14), intelligibility
(Items numbers 1,2,4, 12, 13), and prestige (Items
numbers 3, 5,8,9,15). Part III, the major part of the
questionnaire, requires more reflective thinking time from
the participants than the first two parts. In this final part,
99 lexical items were presented to the respondents; the
lexical items were randomly selected from the list. The
respondents were asked to decide whether the sample
lexical items are acceptable for formal writing, informal
writing, formal oral discourse and/or informal oral
discourse. They were also requested to select what they
perceived are unacceptable Philippine English coinages.
Only the results for Part III of the questionnaire are
reported in this paper.
Data Analysis
The attitude of acceptance towards the 99 randomly
selected lexical items was determined by using frequency
counts and percentage. The teacher respondents’ votes for
lexical items which they rated as acceptable for formal
3
Adv. Sci. Lett. 24 (11), 8349-8352
writing (e.g. thesis, reports, academic writing), informal
writing (e.g. SMS, blogs), formal oral context (e.g.
defense, presentations), informal oral context (e.g.
conversations), and for lexical items which they perceived
as unacceptable in Philippine English were tabulated.
Frequencies and percentages were obtained. Following
the study of Bautista4, only those words which obtained
acceptability votes from 50 percent of the teacher
respondents were considered acceptable for use in the
Philippine English.
3. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Our analysis revealed that some respondents
marked selected items acceptable for specific domains
among the four given domains of communication; few
were very tolerant marking almost all the items
acceptable for all the given domains, and some were very
strict marking almost all the items unacceptable in
Philippine English. These items are presented by group
per domain of formal and informal speech and writing as
shown in the subsequent tables and discussion.
Table 1
Acceptable PhilE Lexicon for Formal Writing
Lexical items Frequency of Percentage
Teachers’ Votes
(N=200)
1. accreditor 121 60.5%
2. calvary 127 63.5%
3. cartographic 114 57%
4. emeritus 155 77.5%
5. reproductive 126 63%
health
Among the 99 items subjected to the attitude test,
only 5 or 0.5 percent were accepted for formal writing
gaining more than 50 percent acceptability votes from
200 ESL teacher respondents. As can be seen in Table 1,
the word emeritus which was found used by college
professors and officials, received the highest votes;
whereas, the word cartographic which was commonly
used by broadcast and print media obtained the lowest
number of votes.
If the figures in Table 1 would be taken into
consideration, it may be hypothesized in this early part of
the discussion that the 94 PhilE lexical items were
unaccepted. This indicates the participants’ negative
attitude towards the variable. The results further imply
that the ESL teachers under study were strict acrolectal
users of English who were choosy and meticulous in their
choice of the right vocabulary for formal and academic
writing.
Bautista’s study4 about the attitudes of 86
teachers towards PhilE as a variety and towards specific
Adv. Sci. Lett. 24 (11), 8349-8352 RESEARCH ARTICLE

lexical items revealed the same results. Although the

English teachers in her study had very positive attitudes Table 3
towards Philippine English as a variety, they had negative Unacceptable PhilE Lexicon
reactions towards the 30 lexical items subjected to Lexical Items Frequency Percentage
acceptability test. of Teachers’
votes
Table 2 (N=200)
Acceptable PhilE Lexicon for Informal Writing 1. Balatos 42 21%
2. BDOer 52 26%
Lexical items Frequency of Percentage 3. Bezt 53 26.5%
teachers’ votes 4. blessing in the skies 33 16.5%
(N=200) 5. consuholtant 66 33%
1. Barbeque 98 49% 6. everyjuan 54 27%
2. Walking 116 58% 7. ha ha ha 53 26.5%
distance 8. Hay naku! 44 22%
9. Hellow 66 33%
10. Kumainments 80 40%
Table 2 clearly bares a confusing result. Only two
2 or .02 of the lexical items were rated acceptable for 11. K pop 66 33%
informal writing by 50 percent of the respondents. They 12. Magiclog 48 24%
are the common words used in both oral and written PhilE: 13. major-major 44 22%
the word barbecue which has a localized definition and 14. MIMAROPA 21 10.5%
slightly different from L1 English definition and walking 15. most friendly 45 22.5%
distance which is widely used in spoken speech.
16. mwahh 53 26.5%
More completely surprising was the fact that not 17. res-toe-run 65 32.5%
even one of the 99 lexical items gained acceptability from 18. TIN number 54 27%
50% of the total teacher respondents for formal oral 19. wanna 56 28%
contexts. Twelve lexical expressions: avail of, barbeque,
cartographic, commute, dean’s lister, informal settler, toe-run (i.e., a pun of restaurant) were the most rejected
MIMAROPA (i.e., acronym for Mindoro, Marinduque, lexical items for PhilE. The negative attitude towards the
Romblon, and Palawan), reproductive health, powerpoint, five items may be due to the following reasons: 1) their
thank you and mabuhay, universitywide, and walking intolerance to the five words was restricted by the nature
distance were accepted by 28-35 percent of the 200 of their work as ESL teachers who were conscious of
respondents for informal oral discourses. good and poor constructions; 2) the word kumainment is
not within teachers’/Education jargon; 3) apart from
Table 3 shows the lexical items which were kumainments, all the four expressions sound empty,
unacceptable to 11-40 percent of the respondents who meaningless, and very informal; and 4) they found the
evaluated the 99 selected 21st century Philippine English coined consuholtant reflective of negative image of some
words. Twenty percent of the total lexical items were Filipinos.
marked unacceptable to Philippine English. Two items appeared problematic; more than 26
percent of the respondents expressed negative attitude
These unacceptable items consisted mainly of towards the orthographic representation of man’s laugh
borrowed terms and expressions particularly from ha ha ha (referred to as Discourse Particles)9,10,16 when
Tagalog which were transformed into English through this cannot be ruled out in oral context whenever the
word-formation processes beyond borrowing. The item conversation evolves around festive and funny subject.
balatos was treated with English inflectional suffix s for The present findings suggest that Philippine
plurality; everyjuan is an Englog coinage that resulted English speakers are not familiar with borrowing as a part
from punning (every + one); whereas, kumainments of word-formation processes or a way in which the
resulted from blending the borrowed Tagalog (kumain, to vocabulary of a language grows, which is why the term
eat) and the English morphemes (suffix ment and plural adobo was not accepted despite its inclusion in the 2015
marker s). The items kumainments, hellow (a pun of update of the Oxford English Dictionary. It may be
hello), Kpop (i.e., clipped and combined Korean + pop), worthy to mention that few participants commented that
consuholtant (i.e. ho is infixed with consultant), and res- these are Tagalog words and, therefore, should not be part
of the Philippine English lexical items. Filipino speakers
of English still considered Tagalog items and Taglish or
Englog compounds and blends as lexicon of informality;
hence, those included in the attitude test were not
4
RESEARCH ARTICLE
accepted for both formal oral and written contexts.
The respondents in the present study manifested
possession of the same linguistic attitude with Bautista’s4
participants in the aforementioned study on the attitudes
of 86 ESL teachers from the three leading universities in
the country. Her respondents judged 18 out of 30 PhilE
lexical items and phrasal verbs acceptable for spoken
informal discourse with only 11 out of 18 achieving 75
percent acceptability. Similar to her4 respondents, the
respondents of this present study from state and private
Higher Education Institutions were quite strict with
idiomatic and grammatical constructions. They appeared
meticulous about English structures that they rejected the
unidiomatic verb preposition combinations in the list
which they described as ungrammatical.
The results debunked Malicsi’s13 observation that
English teachers, among other Filipino speakers of
English, have settled into a state of comfort in what he
called Pinoy English, which he described as one gradually
drifting away from American English, British English,
Canadian English, or Australian English. The present
attitude test revealed the English teachers’ conscious
effort to use what they believed is Standard English
lexicon.
The present acceptability test results diverged
from the trend observed by previous studies. Gonzales8
claimed that Filipinisms were already unknowingly
accepted or would eventually be accepted. Although
Bautista8 noted her respondents’ resistance to new
coinages such as busted, brown jokes, traffic and high
blood and borrowed PhiE words such as promdi,
istambays and bonga, she was positive that PhilE words
have been gaining acceptance. However, based on the
present analysis, it seemed that PhilE speakers,
specifically ESL teachers who have tremendous influence
on student speakers of PhilE are not yet open to the idea
of celebrating the growth of their Philippine English
lexicon.
The present paper, taking the premise from the
findings revealed in the present analysis, underscores that
a majority of ESL teachers seemed to be unaware of
World Englishes reality and unfamiliar with PhilE variety.
A scholar2 argued that Philippine English has definitely
gone beyond the stage of internalizing the norms of
Standard American English and is well into the stage of
nativization; however, based on the present findings, the
variety is not fully supported by ESL teachers. If
nativization or linguistic independence is the goal of
PhilE stakeholders, ESL teaching should be extended to
the teaching of PhilE and teaching of language awareness
which includes instruction on English as an international
lingua franca and Philippine English lexicon and
structures. Both teachers and students should be aware of
the word building phenomena in New Englishes and their
implications to the learning of several varieties.
View publication stats
Adv. Sci. Lett. 24 (11), 8349-8352
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