Attitudes of Filipino English Teachers Toward 21st Century Philippine English Writing

摘要

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-wordcorpus 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. Outof 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 werejudged 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 sociolinguisticreality 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 shouldbe aware of the word building phenomena in New Englishes and their implications to the learning of several varieties.