Conducted by VSU
, Started on 2024 -
Completed on 2025
Completed
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Globalization continues to dominate various spheres in our society today, including the world of education.
School institutions, especially higher education institutions, are increasingly positioned within global knowledge
networks, which demand that they continue reimagining their roles not only in academic instruction but also in
fostering inclusive, multilingual, and culturally responsive environments (De Wit, 2015).
In the province of Leyte, Eastern Visayas, a higher education institution namely Visayas State University
(VSU) is also in pursuit of becoming “a globally competitive university for science, technology, and environmental
conservation.” This vision statement has become its guiding principle in all its internationalization initiatives, such as
establishing linkages with international schools and agencies, widening opportunities for international faculty-and-
student exchange programs, and opening programs for the acceptance foreign students, including its first
international graduate student from Nepal, who earned a degree in Master of Science in Forestry in 2024.
These developments signal VSU’s transformation into a ‘global’ and ‘multilingual’ space. With an overall
population of around 10,000 students and employees coming from various ethnolinguistic communities, including
Cebuano, Bikolano, Bisaya, Waray, Tagalog, English, and other foreign languages; this diversity is not only
demographic, but also linguistic and semiotic, deeply embedded in the public and instructional spaces of the
institution.
Given this premise, a study which determines the extent of promoting multilingualism in the case of a state
university and examines deeper power dynamics, institutional ideologies, and social inclusivity based on public
signages in the school has become a compelling inquiry. One way to conduct this investigation is through linguistic
landscaping (LL), which refers to the study of ‘the language of public road signs, advertising billboards, street
names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public signs on government buildings combines to form the linguistic landscape of a given territory, region, or urban agglomeration’ (Landry and Bourghis,1997). In simple
terms, this sociolinguistic inquiry deals with examining signs in public spaces – including, but not limited to, the
languages used in signs, the individuals who produced the signs, the materials used in producing the signs, the
intended audience of the signs, and how these signs are used and regulated (Astillero, 2017). By doing linguistic
landscape studies, linguists are able to provide descriptions of how languages are used in signs, which are seen in
public spaces and in our day-to-day lives.
In educational settings, this inquiry is referred to as ‘Linguistic Schoolscapes,’ which is used to understand
about ‘the way the material use of language in school shapes the ideologies and consciousness of those who study
and work in these educational spaces including pupils’ (Brown, 2012). Furthermore, Shohamy and Waksman (2009)
argued that examining educational linguistic landscape is beneficial to provide a better understanding of what
happens inside schools, in terms of language use. While local linguists in Leyte, such as Cadiente (2019), used LL in
analyzing the signs seen around Tacloban and Palo after the devastation of Typhoon Yolanda in 2013, exploration
on the linguistic landscape of educational settings in the region is very minimal. This situation provides a precedent
that multilingualism in school institutions is not intently looked at and addressed.
In Irosin, Sorsogon, however, Astillero (2017) studied the role of English, Filipino, and other local languages
in a secondary school through schoolscaping, which concluded that the languages on display in the identified school
environment lean toward multilingualism; however, it showed that local languages have very limited space in formal
education, especially in secondary level. This investigation on linguistic diversity in a school setting needs to be
conducted as well in a higher education institution, such as VSU, to better advocate for multilingualism and
internationalization.
Given that there are multiple ethnolinguistic groups in VSU, linguistic schoolscaping is also seen to be
invaluable in examining how language and power interact within universities. This adheres to the assertion of
Shohamy (2018) that the presence of multilingualism in a community and how people interact using these languages
can provide rich sociolinguistic information. An example of this is the study of Biro (2016), which highlighted the
importance of looking into the relationships between the mother tongue, the official language, and foreign languages
as it helps in identifying the minority- and majority-languages of a multilingual community including what language
dominates another.