Many foreign students who come to the Philippines to study English as a Second Language (ESL) view Philippine English less favorably than other English varieties, i.e., American and British English. Despite this, the... [ view full abstract ]
Many foreign students who come to the Philippines to study English as a Second Language (ESL) view Philippine English less favorably than other English varieties, i.e., American and British English. Despite this, the Philippines has become the most preferred country for ESL education among East Asian students (especially Koreans), thanks to its low tuition and living costs. Hoping to shed more light on this phenomenon from both language acquisition and sociolinguistic perspectives, this paper presents several key analyses and findings from a study that investigates Korean learners of English as a Second Language (ESL) in the Philippines: their sociolinguistic perceptions of Philippine English (PhilE) and their effects on L2 speech production. The study comprises two tasks:
- Elicitation task. This task measures the variation in Voice Onset Time (VOT) of L2 English stop consonants. PhilE possesses a distinctive two-way stop system characterized by negative-to-short VOT. This phonation feature is not common among native Korean speakers, whose L1 involves a three-way stop system combined with a significant degree of tonal/vocalic interaction.
- Identification task. Students listened to a recording of a Filipino-accented English speaker and were asked questions that tested their sociolinguistic knowledge of PhilE and sought to reveal their attitudes towards it.
Task 1 results reveal that Korean students in the Philippines are assimilating VOT features of the PhilE stop system across segmental and subsegmental levels, causing them to acquire ‘PhilE-like’ patterns in their speech. Meanwhile, Task 2 results suggest that students who are better at identifying or perceiving PhilE accent features, or expressed more positive attitudes towards them, produced significantly longer VOTs across all phonation types (i.e., they were less likely to assimilate to PhilE norms in their L2 speech).
The study also reveals that Korean students are increasingly showing more neutral-to-positive attitudes towards PhilE as a medium of learning and instruction, but remain reluctant to acquire PhilE accent features in their speech production. Even though Koreans are putting more economic value into Philippine-based ESL education, many of them continue to regard PhilE as a less prestigious, ‘non-native’ variety of English, and still aspire to achieve ‘native-like’ English norms in speech.
