Last May 8, 2020 from 10-11 AM (Philippine Standard Time), Dr. Alejandro S. Bernardo - the president of the Linguistic Society of the Philippines and affiliated with the University of Santo Tomas -gave a special lecture with the title "ELT, COVID-19, and ECQ". For more information about our lectures, particularly our Special Lecture series, visit this link.

This May 8, 2020 from 10-11 AM (Philippine Standard Time), Dr. Alejandro S. Bernardo - the president of the Linguistic Society of the Philippines and affiliated with the University of Santo Tomas - will give a special lecture with the title "ELT, COVID-19, and ECQ". Interested individuals should sign up to gain access to the link to the lecture. Priority will be given to LSP members, and those that signed up early so sign up now! For more information about our lectures, visit this link.

Last March 7, 2020, during the Linguistic Society of the Philippines International Conference, Gefilloyd L. De Castro of Zamboanga State College of Marine Sciences and Technology was awarded the 2020 LSP Outstanding Graduate Paper Award with his paper "Investigating cross-linguistic influence in selected pair nouns in Philippine English". The LSP-OGPA award is made possible through the generosity of Dr. Shirley N. Dita. It seeks to inspire young scholars whose interests are in line with her fields of interest: Philippine languages, World Englishes, and Corpus Linguistics. Read his abstract here: Language is susceptible to changes especially when it comes in contact with another or other languages; hence, new features may emerge. This study attempted to investigate the cross-linguistic influence of and describe the emerging feature in pair nouns scissors, eyeglasses and pants in Philippine English. The study utilized the Philippine component of the International Corpus English (ICE-Philippines), the Global Web-based English (GloWbE), some spoken conversation from the observation of actual conversation, and L1-English translation task. A total of 274 speakers of different L1 participated in the translation task. This study found out emerging feature in the said pair nouns, that is, they are perceived to be singular in meaning whether or not they are plural in form. This case is evident in the morphosyntactic structure where the nouns are uninflected or, if they are, the singular constituents (e.g. articles a and an, verb is, adjectival number one, demonstrative pronoun this and the pronoun it) are used instead of the plural ones. The emerging feature appears to have been influenced by L1 feature in the process of language production and association. The study posits that the said pair nouns are perceived to be one thing/object which is physically inseparable.

THE LINGUISTIC SOCIETY OF THE PHILIPPINES (LSP) AND ITS STAND AGAINST HOUSE BILL NO. 6125, “AN ACT SUSPENDING THE IMPLEMENTATION OF THE USE OF MOTHER TONGUE AS THE MEDIUM OF INSTRUCTION FOR KINDERGARTEN TO GRADE 3” The Linguistic Society of the Philippines (LSP), the premier fifty-year old recognized professional organization of linguists and language enthusiasts in the country, reaffirms the need to further hone the confidence and competence of young Filipino learners in all subject areas, including English. The Philippine educational system has to move forward following a roadmap framed by experts in linguistics and language education based on empirical grounding. Experiences of other multilingual countries all point to a fact that the mother tongue is the best language of learning, especially in the early grades. The mother tongue is the most effective bridge to and foundation for the learning of other languages like English. Now that a new bill, i.e. House Bill No. 6125, which calls for the suspension of the implementation of mother tongue or first language as a medium of instruction from Kindergarten to Grade 3 is being proposed, LSP once again is making a stand against a proposition that disables the ethnolinguistic minority communities to take part in broader linguistic circles and a proposition incognizant of the advantages and benefits of RA 10533 otherwise known as the Enhanced Basic Education Act of 2013. LSP firmly believes that young learners learn best when the mother tongue is used as a medium of instruction particularly in the early stage of basic education. A good number of studies done in other countries, e.g., Ramirez, Yuen and Ramey, 1991; Thomas and Collier, 1997 and in the Philippines, e.g., Walter and Dekker, 2011, all point to one thing: the use of the mother tongue as language of instruction benefitted the learners in various ways. LSP, therefore, believes that the problem is not MTB-MLE itself but how it is currently implemented in the country. House Bill No. 6125 blames the lack of instructional materials and treats this as the fundamental basis for the suspension of MTB-MLE in the country. What we need, however, is a concerted effort and a political will to capacitate the concerned government sectors, particularly the Department of Education (DepEd), to work in collaboration with universities, professional organizations, book companies, and non-profit government organizations, in order to produce teaching and learning materials needed by both instructors and schoolchildren to effectively implement the use of the mother tongue or first language in basic education. What we need at this point is a more potent mechanism to ensure that DepEd and its partner organizations and institutions will be able to produce adequate and effective teaching and learning materials very soon for MTB-MLE to properly work. The Philippines has indeed learned from other multilingual nations, e.g., Papua New Guinea, Nepal, Bolivia, Guatemala, Zambia, Bangladesh and other developing countries, when MTB-MLE was promulgated. LSP hopes that the educational system in the country will continue to make informed decisions for the sake of the Filipino learners.

This year’s Br. Andrew Gonzalez FSC Distinguished Professorial Chair in Linguistics & Language Education is Associate Professor Shirley N. Dita from De La Salle University. Her talk will be held on February 29, 2020 from 10 AM to 12 PM at De La Salle University. For more information, visit this link.

The University of Santo Tomas Faculty of Arts and Letters Department of English and Linguistic Society of the Philippines are co-hosting a special lecture this November 16, 2019: “The Three Pillars of Language and Migration Studies: Positioning the Filipinos in Hawaii, USA” to be given by none other than Dr. Rodney Jubilado. Details can be found here: https://www.lsphil.net/special-lectures Interested participants should email english.department@ust.edu.ph.

LSP has chosen to collaborate with the University of Santo Tomas Center Continuing Professional Education and Development (CCPED), on an exclusive basis, to co-organize the upcoming Philippine Linguistic Institute with SIL Philippines. As part of the agreement, they will also offer and conduct Certificate Programs on the following learning tracks: technologies in conducting linguistic research, language documentation, and corpus-based research. The Philippine Linguistic Institute is an intensive program organized by the Linguistics Society of the Philippines in cooperation with the Summer Institute of Linguistics Philippines. It aims to provide linguists, teachers, language scholars, researchers, cultural workers, and policy makers with training on selected topics by experts and practitioners in the field. In 2020, the third Philippine Linguistic Institute will be held at the University of Santo Tomas from June 22 to 26. The theme for 2020’s PLI is LANGUAGE/TECHNOLOGIES. The MOA between LSP and CCPED was signed on October 1, 2019 at the Thomas Aquinas Research Complex, University of Santo Tomas. Present were the LSP President, Dr. Alejandro S. Bernardo, and LSP Treasurer, Dr. Rachelle B. Lintao, UST Graduate School Dean, Dr. Michael Anthony C. Vasco and CCPED Director, Assoc. Prof. Jocelyn F. Agcaoilli.

The Emy M. Pascacio Memorial Lecture was held at the Ateneo de Manila University last September 14, 2019. Prof. Edmundo Litton of Loyola Marymount University delivered a talk on mother tongue-based, multilingual education.

Free Linguistics Conference in collaboration with Papaya Academy Inc. and Linguistic Society of the Philippines are delighted to offer a free course on Decolonising Pedagogy. Current educational theories and practices are highly dependent on work done in a few western (colonial) contexts. As a result, these approaches do not lead to empowerment of our students (in colonized settings; see: The Myth of the Post-Colonial). Decolonising Pedagogy is an approach to teaching/learning that helps us in decolonising our ways of knowing, doing and being. In this course, participants will develop and implement projects in their contexts that address community needs. The course will be led by Associate Professor Ahmar Mahboob and Mona Mamac from the Department of Linguistics, University of Sydney. Registration and participation in the course is open to all: there are NO restrictions on age, education, gender, language, location, job, training etc. Cost: $0 — While this course is free of cost, we appreciate donations to keep FLC going. Schedule Sept 14: face-to-face workshop at Papaya Academy Inc. (Kasiglahan main road, San Jose, Rodrigues, Rizal, Philippines) Sept 15 to December 15: individual/group work January 4: face-to-face workshop and presentations (Kasiglahan main road, San Jose, Rodrigues, Rizal, Philippines) Registration for this course will close on September 10, 2019 Please note that we have space for only 25 participants. Participants will be selected based on their response to the open question: “What are some community needs/issues that I can help address through my teaching?” [To respond to this question, we recommend that you look through: 1. What is Subaltern Linguistics? / Ano ang subaltern linguistics? 2. Doing Subaltern Linguistics; you may respond in either English or Filipino].

This year's Emy M. Pascasio Memorial lecture will be given by Dr. Edmundo Litton. The talk, "Promoting Language Diversity in the Philippines: Lessons learned by a Filipino immigrant in the USA", tackles issues of race, ethnicity, socio-economic status, and culture impact how languages are learned in schools and will explore various factors that educators in the Philippines need to consider as they continue to implement mother tongue instruction. For more information, click HERE.