Assessing the enactment of mother tongue-based multilingual education (MTB-MLE) through a linguistic schoolscape of a philippine elementary school

The term linguistic landscape (LL), the language of road signs, is popularized by Landry and Bourhis (1997). Since then, the studies exploring the signs in larger urban communities have grown. Recent trajectories have pointed to investigation of LL into semipublic contexts such as buildings, libraries, and schools. Gorter (2013) posits that the educational institution has gained most attention among scholars (Dagenais et al., 2009; Sayer, 2010; Gorter, 2017). With this, the field warrants further investigation of issues and novel perspectives within the context of education. This study is an attempt to provide a new perspective about linguistic landscape in school setting using the case of the implementation of a mother tongue-based multilingual education (MTB-MLE) in the Philippines. The study aims to explore the construction of LL as a representation of a local language policy and a reflection of language ideology in a public elementary school. To accomplish this, an eclectic approach combining quantitativequalitative design and “tourist guide technique” (Biro, 2016) is used. To aid in data analysis of 168 signs, Scollon and Scollon’s (2003) visual semiotics principles and Trumper-Hecht’s (2010) notions of space are utilized. Findings revealed that most of the signs found were monolingual and the dominant code use was English. Applying visual semiotics, signs in English are given prominence in terms of position, color, and physical materiality. Using TrumperHecht’s conceived space, the deployment of English might suggest an ideological act of putting premium on globalization. Conversely, this might manifest the continued marginalization of mother tongue in a multilingual setting.