Essay About Standard English In The Philippines

English teachers in the Philippines often find themselves in a very frustrating situation – no matter how hard they try to teach the rules of written English to their students, the students still commit errors in word order, word choice, subject-verb agreement, tenses, prepositions, articles, punctuations, and the like. Teachers get frustrated when they hear or read sentences such as

“They decided to got married,” “What did the students watched?,” or “Ana go to canteen.” It is also alarming because the rules that apply to these sentences are supposedly simple rules that the students should have learned in the grade school. Yet. Here they are in college, still committing those same errors. Teachers and linguists alike have sought and (probably)

That answer alone could raise a lot of issues. It only shows that the concept of standard is problematic. According to Fairclough (1995), there is a need for a particular standard in order to rationalize policies on the teaching of Standard English. He further states that appropriateness figures within dominant conceptions of language variations (234).

Is there an implied claim then that students of English as a second language or as a foreign language speak a substandard kind of English because they do not follow the standards of General

American variety? What if they (Filipinos, for example) have accepted English and appropriated it to fit their needs and the context of situation in their own places?

Andrew Gonzalez (1985), in his paper, When Does an Error Become a Feature of Philippine English, pointed out that until Philippine English is really creolized, English is still a second language in the

Philippines, and he believed that in teaching any second language, one must accept a standard.

However, he also stressed that no matter how hard English teachers tries, a local variety