(Il)Legitimating Filipino Teachers' English on Webpages for Japanese Learners of English

Abstract

AbstractRecent studies indicate that many foreign students now choose to go to the Philippines for university and language education. In this paper, we examine how Filipino Teachers' English (FTE) is represented on English language schools' webpages to market the Philippines as an alternative destination for acquiring “good” English among Japanese nationals. By examining a combination of online texts, photos, and videos through the lens of multimodal discourse analysis, we found that FTE is often presented as affordable and native‐like or somewhat akin to American English. While on the surface the shift of focus to the Philippines as a place for English education may appear to dismantle Japanese learners' strong preference for native speakers of English, the schools reinforce the hierarchization of English by invoking American English and/or native‐speakerist ideals. In short, FTE is promoted as a desirable option because it can pass as native‐like and is affordable. Unlike the less prestigious varieties of English spoken by the majority of Filipinos, which are implicitly stigmatized as impure and therefore inferior and undesirable, FTE is constructed as high quality at low cost. Through this representation, English language schools in the Philippines participate in the complex process of legitimating and illegitimating Philippine English, while at the same time reinforcing the hierarchization of English and the ideology of native speakerness.