Investigating Filipino College Teachers' Views on Aestheticizing the English Accent in ELT

Although English language teaching (ELT) increasingly recognizes the legitimacy of diverse Englishes, accent remains a powerful basis for judging teachers' competence, credibility, and professional value. This study examines how Filipino college teachers view the aestheticization of English accents in ELT and how they negotiate their own accents in relation to other English varieties. Using a qualitative design, the study drew on semi‐structured online interviews with 16 Filipino college English teachers from different higher education institutions in the Philippines. The data were analyzed thematically through the lenses of language aesthetics as language ideology, metapragmatic distance, and Unequal Englishes. Findings show that teachers often define a ‘good‐sounding’ accent in terms of intelligibility, clarity, student understanding, and classroom usefulness rather than ‘native’‐like imitation. At the same time, they recognize the continuing prestige of Americanized, ‘neutral,’ and ‘standard’ accents as forms of symbolic and market value. Their narratives reveal both resistance to accent hierarchies and partial accommodation to dominant norms through self‐monitoring, audience‐oriented adjustment, and plural‐Englishes pedagogy. The study contributes to ELT scholarship by centering Filipino teachers' voices and by showing how accent, identity, pedagogy, and linguistic justice intersect in higher education.