English is an important language in Hong Kong, an international city located on the southern coast of the People’s Republic of China that, for over 150 years to 1997, was a British colony. This paper describes and analyses changes in teaching methodologies in the English language curriculum formally proposed for Hong Kong junior secondary schools from 1975 to the present day, to study how the c...

1. Abstract This paper reports on findings of a keywords analysis comparing the ACE corpus of written Australian English (AusE) and the Flob corpus of written British English (BrE). The main aims of the study are to provide evidence of the cultural representativeness of ACE and to identify significant features of lexical frequency associated with written AusE which are distinct from written BrE...

This study compared the preference of 27 British English- and 26 Welsh-learning infants for nonwords featuring consonants that occur with equal frequency in the input but that are produced either with equal frequency (Welsh) or with differing frequency (British English) in infant vocalizations. For the English infants a significant difference in looking times was related to the extent of produc...

This paper describes the corpus of recordings of children’s speech which was collected as part of the EU FP5 PF STAR project. The corpus contains more than 60 hours of speech, including read and imitated native-language speech in British English, German and Swedish, read and imitated non-nativelanguage English speech from German, Italian and Swedish children, and native-language spontaneous and...

levelling have concluded that phonological convergence amongst varieties of British English is rife. This review attempts to demonstrate the opposite, in the variety of English spoken in Liverpool. Despite various media reports predicting the death of Liverpool English, evidence is provided here that the variety appears to be resisting the innovation of ‘Tglottalling’, a feature which is freque...

This study investigated whether Iranian EFL learners are aware of different varieties of English spoken throughout the world and whether they have tendency towards a particular variety of English. Likewise, it explored the attitudes of Iranian EFL learners towards the native and non-native varieties of English. Moreover, it made an attempt to investigate whether such attitudes are gender-orient...

This paper reports on a corpus-based quantitative study of the use of nominalizations across China English and British English in two comparable media corpora. In contrast to previous corpus-based studies of nominalizations, we start by using a syntactic approach and proceed with some methodological innovations incorporating large lexical databases and syntactically annotated corpora. The data ...

“Textisms” are semi-standardized abbreviations and conventions uses in SMS text messaging. Students in the fourth and fifth grades (N = 136) were exposed to words on a spelling list as correctly-spelled words, incorrectly-spelled words, or “textisms” to determine whether short term exposure to “textisms” decreased spelling performance for elementary aged children. Multivariate ANOVA found expos...