See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/346939352

World Englishes, Philippine English, and English language education in the

Philippines

Presentation · November 2001

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.11483.39205

CITATION READS
1 2,938

2 authors, including:

Maria (Ma.) Lourdes S. Bautista

De La Salle University
31 PUBLICATIONS   482 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

Philippine English View project

Studies of Philippine English View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Maria (Ma.) Lourdes S. Bautista on 11 December 2020.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

 World Englishes, Philippine English and English Language Education
in the Philippines*

Ma. Lourdes S. Bautista

De La Salle University-Manila

I will follow the brief given to us and begin with background information about
the Philippines, and go on to discuss one pressing need in language education and one
innovation to address that need. I will then proceed to the topic of concern this afternoon,
World Englishes.

The Philippines is highly multilingual. It is estimated that there are at least 80

languages spoken in the country, and some linguists place the number as high as 170
(Quakenbush, 1998). Eight of these languages are each spoken by more than one million
mother tongue speakers, and taken together they account for 86% of the population.
Given the multiplicity of native languages, the language problem of the country has been
described by sociolinguists as trying to reconcile the competing demands of ethnicity
(represented by the vernaculars), nationalism (symbolized by the national language,
Filipino), and modernization (associated with the international language, English).

The language provision of the constantly changing Constitution has tried to

balance these competing demands (see Bautista, 1996 for a brief overview of the
language provision across different Constitutions). The 1986 Constitution states that the
national language is Filipino and it shall be further developed and enriched by existing
Philippine and other languages. Filipino shall be used as a medium of official
communication and as a language of instruction in the educational system. The official
languages are Filipino and, until other wise provided by law, English. The regional
languages are the auxiliary official languages in the regions and shall serve as auxiliary
media of instruction therein. Spanish and Arabic shall be promoted on a voluntary and
optional basis.

The Philippines follows a Bilingual Education Policy (first issued in 1974), which
has the avowed aim of developing a bilingual nation competent in the use of both the
national language and English. It mandates the separate use of English and Filipino as
media of instruction in elementary and high school for definite subject areas: English for
Science, Mathematics, and English Communication Arts, and Filipino for all other
subjects. Revised in 1987, it now provides for the use of the major vernaculars as
languages for initial schooling and literacy.

The Philippines is a developing country, meaning it is not a rich country. In 1997,

in a population of 72 million, 36.8% of Filipino families lived below the poverty
threshold (Philippine Statistical Yearbook 2000). The poverty of course has

*
I would like to thank Dr. Maria Luz C. Vilches, Executive Director of the Ateneo Center for English
Language Teaching, Ateneo de Manila University, and Coordinator of the Philippines English Language
Teaching Project, for the very valuable information and materials on the PELT project, summarized in the
concluding section of the paper.
 2

consequences on the educational attainment of Filipinos: Out of 100 entering Grade 1

pupils, only 69 finish Grade 6, only 48 finish fourth year high school, only 26 start
college and only 16 graduate (former Education Secretary Andrew Gonzalez, personal
communication). It also has consequences on literacy rates. In 1989, the illiteracy rate in
the Philippines was 10.2%, or about 6 million of the population, but the functional
illiteracy rate was pegged at 28.6% or about 13 million of the population, 10 years old
and above, indicating that basic literacy skills do not expand to have an effect on people’s
daily activities (Doronila & Acuña, 1994, p. 2).

The year 2001 marks the 100th year of the establishment of the public school
system in the Philippines and also the 100th year of English in the country. The national
Censuses have tracked the growth of speakers of English in the Philippines: The number
has gone from 27% in 1939, to 36% in 1948, to 39% in 1960, to 45% in 1970. In 1980,
the last year when the number of speakers of English was counted, the Census put the
figure at 65% of the population (Gonzalez, 1997). A survey conducted by a reputable
private group in 1993 (Social Weather Stations, 1994), using a nationwide but small
sample of 1200 adults, reported that 74% of the respondents claimed to be able to
understand spoken English, 56% able to speak English, 73% able to read English, and
59% able to write in English. Although there are disparities among social classes and
between urban and rural areas, it can perhaps be said that a sizable number of the
population uses English as a second or foreign language.

What is the major need in English language education in the Philippines? To me,
the most pressing need is teacher in-service training. It is estimated that there are some
90,000 English teachers in the public and private basic education system at this time
(Andrew Gonzalez, personal communication) and it is widely acknowledged that many of
them do not have adequate knowledge of the language and/or do not have the expertise to
teach the language effectively. Two innovative teacher training programs begun in the
late nineteen nineties have tried to reach out to secondary school teachers: CONSTEL
and PELT. They were not planned in tandem, but they can be viewed as complementing
each other, with CONSTEL providing a grounding on the vertical dimension (i.e. the
different macro-skills) and PELT providing the integration of the skills on the horizontal
dimension (focusing, e.g., on learner involvement, critical thinking)

CONSTEL stands for Continuing Studies in Education via Television. The idea
behind CONSTEL-English, launched in late 1997 as a collaboration between a
government television network and reputable public and private teacher education
institutions with funding from the government, is to use videotapes and television airtime
to help secondary English language teachers develop professionally. CONSTEL-English
consists of 45 one-hour telelessons divided into six segments – Listening, Speaking,
Reading, Writing, Grammar, Literature – with Language Testing integrated into each
segment. Each segment is accompanied by printed Teacher Supplementary Materials,
intended to provide pre-viewing, while-viewing, and post-viewing activities, to explain
some background material, and to suggest teaching strategies and enrichment activities.
A total of 650 sets of tapes and TSMs have already been distributed to high schools and
teacher education institutions in the different regions of the country; the tapes are also
 3

aired continuously once a week through the government TV network. Ideally, teacher
trainers would go around the country to help teachers use the tapes more efficiently for
their professional development, but so far only a handful of training seminars have been
conducted.

PELT is the Philippines English Language Teaching Project, a four-year (1995-

1999) UK-Philippine government initiative that aimed at upgrading the teaching skills of
public secondary teachers in seven out of the 16 educational administration regions of the
Philippines. The project was coordinated by the Ateneo Center for English Language
Teaching (ACELT) with consultancy assistance from the Institute for English Language
Education (IELE) of Lancaster University. The PELT training scheme had two
components: the sending of 60 teachers to the UK over a three-year period to undergo
10-week training at IELE, and the training in-country of 80-100 high school teachers for
six weeks over two summers at Ateneo de Manila University. The teachers sent to IELE
became the lead trainers and the teachers sent to the Ateneo became field resource staff.
They subsequently conducted training programs that lasted two weeks; these seminars
have reached about 2000 participants. The participants are trained to carry out a School-
based Follow-up Development Activity (SFDA) that could focus on a specific concern of
the teacher or department, such as developing small group activities to supplement
whole-class activities, or preparing discourse tasks to enrich sentence-level grammar
discussions. The PELT project will be discussed in greater detail below.

Let me now turn to the topic of emphasis this afternoon: World Englishes, and
the ways we are using this paradigm in English language education in the Philippines.

Philippine English, the English spoken in the Philippines, is considered one of the
New Varieties of English or New Englishes. In Kachru’s Concentric Circle Model of the
spread of English, the Philippines is included in the Outer Circle, encompassing countries
in which English is an institutionalized additional language.

Philippine English (henceforth, PE) has long been an object of study in the
Philippines, beginning with Llamzon’s pioneering work Standard Filipino English
published in 1969. Prior to that monograph, English in the Philippines was studied
within the framework of interference, as inadequate attempts to hit the target of Standard
American English. Numerous studies were written in the fifties, sixties, and early
seventies on the Filipinos’ inability to produce the sounds of English, or to observe the
grammar rules of English, or to learn the idiomatic expressions and vocabulary of
English. Llamzon’s work was so radical in approach and so ahead of its time that it
received a lukewarm reception. One reviewer asked the question, “Is there an English
variety called Filipino English? Is it not more accurate to call the English which
Filipinos speak as English as a second language?” (Hidalgo, 1970, p. 129). Another
reviewer (Gonzalez, 1972) pointed out that Llamzon had not provided enough evidence
to show that English was indeed spoken natively by a large number of Filipinos.

From this vantage point, of course, the work is now seen as being prescient, in
fact anticipating the works of Kachru (summarized in Kachru, 1997) by several years.
 4

We recognize that World Englishes (WE) is a paradigm that has opened new avenues for
research and new ways of revitalizing language teaching. In a paper that he presented at
the RELC 2001 seminar titled “Beyond World Englishes”, Pennycook reminded us of the
achievements of WE, namely:

1. Acknowledging the sociolinguistic realities of varieties of English

2. Describing the multiple varieties of English
3. Focusing on the communicative concerns of local Englishes
4. Emphasizing the wider ownership of English
5. Privileging the local pragmatic features of English
6. Decentering language standards from center norms
7. Destabilizing the native speaker/non-native speaker relationship

In the Philippines, the WE paradigm has invigorated research on PE. Allow me to

briefly review the major studies that have analyzed the linguistic features of educated PE
and described the attitudes towards it.

The studies that have been done on the phonology of PE (Aquino et al., 1966;
Llamzon, 1969; Alberca, 1978; Gonzalez, 1985) have characterized it as follows:
absence of the schwa; substitution of [a] for [æ], [ ] for [o], [I] for [i], [ ] for [e];
substitution of [s] for [z], [s] for [z], [t] for [0], [d] for [ð], [p] for [f], [b] for [v];
simplification of consonant clusters in final position; and syllable-timed, rather than
stress-timed, rhythm.

Through careful study (Alberca, 1978; Gonzalez, 1985; Bautista, 2000), the
grammatical features of PE have been identified as: lack of subject-verb agreement,
especially in the presence of an intervening prepositional phrase or expression; faulty
article usage, e.g. missing article in * majority of; faulty preposition usage, e.g. result to,
based from, cope up with; faulty noun subcategorization, including non-pluralization of
count nouns and pluralization of mass nouns; lack of agreement between pronoun and
antecedent; and faulty tense-aspect usage including unusual use of verb forms and tenses,
use of the past perfect tense for the simple past or present perfect, lack of tense sequence.

The study of PE lexicon (Dar, 1973; Bautista, 1997) has shown how the
vocabulary has grown through such processes as the influence of material culture (food
terms, kinship terms, cultural novelties), coinage (e.g. Imeldific, presidentiable, face
towel, turo-turo restaurant), and analogy (rallyist, dormmate, watch-your-car boy).
Lexical items and phrasal expressions that are “neither American nor British, which are
acceptable and used in Filipino educated circles, and are similar to expression patterns in
Tagalog”, e.g. open/close the light, my stomach is painful, have been called Filipinisms
by Llamzon (1969, p. 46) and subsequent researchers have followed his lead.

The discourse patterns of PE have been studied by Gonzalez (1985), who found
three styles: formal, informal, and familiar. Formal style has complex sentences showing
nominalization, relativization, and complementation; informal style uses short and simple
sentences and ellipses; familiar style utilizes code-switching between a familiar style in
 5

Tagalog and a more formal style in English. He claimed that the typical Filipino writer is
monostylistic in English, having fullest control over the classroom composition style.

Attitude studies have also been done with regard to PE. My studies (Bautista
2001a, b) used two sets of respondents – one set consisting of 86 English Department
faculty from the three leading universities in the Philippines and another set consisting of
180 Arts and Sciences faculty from three state universities in Luzon. I found that they
generally held positive attitudes towards PE. A majority of them also claimed to speak
PE or Mix PE (PE and American English). However, although they looked favorably on
PE as a variety, they rejected specific Filipinisms which occur quite often in spoken
English and sometimes in print material – result to, based from, taken cared of,
open/close the light, equipments – perhaps because the Filipinisms were considered
ungrammatical or unidiomatic. I interpreted the attitude studies to indicate a rejection of
the grammatical features of PE, but an acceptance of its phonological and lexical
features.

On the basis of the findings, I have been led to conclude that Filipinos in general
accept an endonormative (local) standard for the teaching of pronunciation and
vocabulary but an exonormative (foreign, i.e. Standard American English) standard for
the teaching of grammar. That is, we want to sound Filipino when we speak English, but
we want to use correct grammar.

To me, one contribution of the WE paradigm to English language education in the

Philippines is clarifying the notion of when an error becomes a feature of PE. Many of
the studies I have mentioned implicitly followed D’Souza’s criteria for considering a
usage as acceptable: A usage is acceptable if it is widespread, systematic, rule-governed,
and used by competent users of the language in formal situations (1998, p. 92). Thus, PE
is not anything goes. And over and above the question of intelligibility (a matter of
understanding pronunciation), comprehensibility (a matter of understanding the literal
meaning), and interpretability (a matter of understanding the intended meaning), as Smith
and Nelson (1985) have clarified for us, there is also the question of acceptability.
Something may be intelligible, comprehensible, and interpretable, but it may not be
acceptable (Llamzon, 1969; Tan, 1982). Intelligibility is a low bar; acceptability is the
higher bar.

The other contribution of the WE paradigm is clarifying what we want to use as

the target for the teaching of pronunciation and grammar in the Philippines: It is
educated PE phonology and Standard American English grammar. An oft-cited quotation
from Singapore’s ambassador to the United Nations aptly expresses the Filipino
sentiment on the matter of a local pronunciation:

When one is abroad, in a bus or train or aeroplane and when one

overhears someone speaking, one can immediately say this is someone
from Malaysia or Singapore. And I should hope that when I’m speaking
abroad, my countrymen will have no problem recognising that I am a
Singaporean. (Tay and Gupta , 1983, p. 180, quoting Tongue, 1979)
 6

Yet another contribution of the WE paradigm to ELE in the Philippines is

psychological: For those of us who are more fluent in English than in our mother tongue
in certain domains, there is no more guilt. WE has told us that we are the product of our
history, and a colonial language is part of that history. Likewise, there is no shame in
speaking a variety that is slightly different from the foreign standard. Since users are the
owners of a variety, we own English too and can give it our own distinctive stamp.
Having a pluricentricity of norms enables us to say that English has become functionally
native to our country and educated PE can become our standard.

However, innovation in ELE in the Philippines does not derive directly from the
WE paradigm. Instead, the paradigm has helped clarify the nature of the variety of
English being taught. Innovative ways of doing things are entering the system via
teacher training programs, and here I’d like to focus on the innovations being introduced
by the PELT project.

To me, the beauty of PELT lies in its clear-sightedness on two points. One is the
clear identification of topics in its seminar training component, built around the theme
“Promoting language learning in the ELT classroom”, namely: “[1] how the parts of a
lesson can be more cohesively integrated; [2] how learners can be challenged to think
critically at the appropriate level; [3] how learners can be more motivated to learn; [4]
how learner interaction can be facilitated better; and [5] how the learning of grammar can
be made more appetizing” (Vilches, 2000, p. 4). In terms of [1], teachers are trained on
integrating language work, so that the teaching of grammar, listening, speaking, reading,
writing, and literature can blend seamlessly through the organizing principle of a task.
For [2], teachers are trained on the different levels of thinking, from memory to
translation, interpretation, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation, and given
activities to help them prepare lessons that tapped these different levels. Regarding [3],
teachers are trained to develop lessons that facilitate learner involvement, relating lessons
to the lives of the students and helping them exercise ownership over the material and
their learning. With regard to [4], teachers are trained on the use of small group work
and other activities that move classrooms from being teacher-controlled to student-
directed. And for [5], teachers are trained to make grammar work more creative, through
grammar lessons that are “cognitively challenging, affectively involving, and capable of
providing opportunities for meaningful production”. (The Special PELT Project Issue of
The ACELT Journal, April 1998, provides a sample lesson for each of these areas of
concern.)

The other strength of the PELT project is the clear assignment given to each
participant to develop a School-based Follow-up Development Activity (SFDA) that
follows on from the seminar training component (see Waters & Vilches, 2000, for a full
description). Thus, a bridge is built between the in-service training program and the
schools to which the seminar participants return. Participants are not expected to give the
usual “echo” seminar in their respective schools – they are teachers, after all, not teacher
trainers, and one cannot train a trainer overnight (Vilches, personal communication).
Instead, they are each expected to develop an action plan that they will implement in their
school, with the help of a colleague, the Department Head, and the learners. (As an
 7

example, the action plan given in Waters and Vilches (2000, p. 134) involves using
students’ personal experiences in free communication activities, a plan that seems to have
been built specifically around area of concern [3] above, building learner involvement.)
Teachers are taught how to prepare data-gathering instruments for the implementation
phase (a teacher’s log, an observer’s form, a learners’ views questionnaire) so they can
collect baseline data and impact data. There is also an “after-care” workshop where the
seminar trainers, the Department Heads, and the teacher participants get together for
monitoring and support. The scheme for the SFDA is illustrated below:

[insert figure here – unfortunately I don’t have the figure anymore]

The seminar training component and the SFDA, then, force the teacher to become
a reflective teacher, which is a goal in ELE.

References

The ACELT Journal. Special PELT Project Issue – “Exploring the ELT Paradigm:
Principles and Practice.” April 1998. Vol. 2, No. 1.

Alberca, W. L. (1978). The distinctive features of Philippine English of the mass media.
Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Santo Tomas.

Aquino, M. R., Duque, L. A., Pimentel, S. B., & Rojas, J. T. (1966). A study to
determine the most intelligible variety of English pronunciation for use in the
Philippines, 2 volumes. Master’s thesis, Philippine Normal College, Manila.
(Adapted by the Language Study Center, Philippine Normal College. (1972).
The most intelligible variety of English pronunciation for use in the Philippines.
Quezon City: Alemar-Phoenix Publishing House, Inc.)

Bautista, M. L. S. (1996). An outline: The national language and the language of

instruction. In M. L. S. Bautista (Ed.), Readings in Philippine sociolinguistics,
2nd edition (pp. 223-227). Manila: De La Salle University Press.

Bautista, M. L. S. (1997). The lexicon of Philippine English. In M. L. S. Bautista (Ed.),

English is an Asian language: The Philippine context (pp. 49-72). Australia: The
Macquarie Library Pty. Ltd.

Bautista, M. L. S. (2000). Defining Standard Philippine English: Its status and

grammatical features. Manila: De La Salle University Press. (Summarized in:
The grammatical features of educated Philippine English. In M. L. S. Bautista, T.
A. Llamzon & B. P. Sibayan (Eds.), Parangal cang Brother Andrew: Festschrift
 8

for Andrew Gonzalez on his sixtieth birthday (pp. 146-158). Manila: Linguistic
Society of the Philippines, 2000.)

Bautista, M. L. S. (2001a). Attitudes of English language faculty in three leading

Philippine universities towards Philippine English. Asian Englishes, 4 (1), 4-32.

Bautista, M. L. S. (2001b). Attitudes of selected Luzon University students and faculty

towards Philippine English. In M. L. G. Tayao et al. (Eds.), Rosario E. Maminta
in focus: Selected writings in applied linguistics (pp. 236-273). Quezon City:
Philippine Association for Language Teaching.

Dar, R. A. (1973). A study on the nature of Filipinisms. Unpublished MA thesis,

Ateneo de Manila University.

Doronila, M. L. C. & Acuña, J. E. (1994). Learning from life: An ethnographic study of

functional literacy in fourteen Philippine communities. (Vol. 2 Main report –
Abridged version.) Manila: Education Research program, Center for Integrative
and Development Studies, University of the Philippines; Literacy Coordinating
Council of the Philippines; Bureau of Non-Formal Education, Department of
Education, Culture, and Sports, Republic of the Philippines.

D’Souza, J. (1998). Review of Arjuna Parakrama’s De-hegemonizing language

standards: Learning from (post) colonial Englishes about “English”. Asian
Englishes, 1 (2), 86-94.

Gonzalez, A., FSC. (1972). Book review: Standard Filipino English by Teodoro
Llamzon, SJ. Philippine Journal for Language Teaching, 7 (1-2), 93-108.

Gonzalez, A., FSC. (1983). When does an error become a feature of Philippine English?
In R.B. Noss (Ed.), Varieties of English in Southeast Asia (pp. 150-172). (RELC
Anthology Series #11.) Singapore: SEAMEO Regional Language Centre.

Gonzalez, A., FSC. (1985). Studies on Philippine English. Singapore: SEAMEO

Regional Language Centre.

Gonzalez, A., FSC. (1997). The history of English in the Philippines. In M. L. S.

Bautista (Ed.), English is an Asian language (pp. 25-40). Australia: The
Macquarie Library Pty. Ltd.

Hidalgo, C. A. (1970). Review of Teodoro A. Llamzon’s Standard Filipino English.

Philippine Journal of Linguistics, 1 (1), 129-132.

Kachru, B. B. (1998). English as an Asian language. In M. L. S. Bautista (Ed.), English

is an Asian language (pp. 1-23). Australia: The Macquarie Library Pty. Ltd.
 9

Llamzon, T. A. (1969). Standard Filipino English. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila

University Press.

Pennycook, A. (2001). Beyond World Englishes. Paper presented at the 36th RELC
International Seminar on “Grammar in the Language Classroom: Changing
Approaches and Practices”, SEAMEO Regional Language Centre, Singapore,
April 23-25, 2001.

Philippine Statistical Yearbook. (2000). Manila: National Statistical Coordination

Board, Republic of the Philippines.

Quakenbush, J. S. (1998). “Other” Philippine languages in the Third Millennium.

Philippine Journal of Linguistics, 29 (1 & 2), 1-22.

Smith, L. E. & Nelson, C. L. (1985). International intelligibility of English: Directions

and resources. World Englishes, 4 (3), 333-342.

Social Weather Stations. (1994). Survey findings on the use of the English language.
Philippine Journal of Linguistics, 25 (1-2), 85-94.

Tan, P. M. (1982). Comprehensibility and acceptability of deviant forms of formulaic

expressions in English of Filipino graduate students. Unpublished doctoral
dissertation, University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City.

Tay, M. W. J. & Gupta, A. F. (1983). Towards a description of Standard Singapore

English. In R. B. Noss (Ed.), Varieties of English in Southeast Asia (pp. 173-
189). (Anthology Series 11.) Singapore: SEAMEO Regional Language Centre.

Tongue, R. K. (1979). The English of Singapore and Malaysia, 2nd. ed. Singapore:
Eastern Universities Press.

Vilches, M. L. C. (2000). Professional development of literacy educators: The ACELT

experience. Paper read at the Pearl Anniversary Convention of the Reading
Association of the Philippines, May 19, 2000.

Waters, A. & Vilches, M. L. C. (2000). Integrating teacher learning: The School-Based

Follow-Up Development Activity. ELT Journal, 54 (2), 126-134.

View publication stats