The ownership of English has been hotly debated for a long time by researchers in the field of English Language Teaching (ELT). World Englishes expand the ownership of English from Inner Circle countries to Outer and Expanding Circle countries based on Kachru's (1985) Three Circle Model. In light of this, it can be claimed that World Englishes…

In the current study, data from A Corpus of English Dialogues (1560-1760) are used to consider contexts with the have-perfect and temporal adverbs of the definite past time such as yesterday, last night, ago. Data analysis is conducted within the framework of a usage-based approach, which gives evidence to the hypothesis that in Early Modern…

Could the standardisation of language narrow disparities in achievement in education amongst people of different social class, and within and across ethnicities and genders, and could this have implications for injustices and inequities in wider society? In analysing socio-economic diversity through the lens of its correlation with language, this…

While most empirical studies have investigated the improvement of learners' L2 spoken proficiency via speaking-related interventions, the present study examined the same topic through a different modality: listening. Ninety-five first-year tertiary-level students of English as a second language (ESL) in Hong Kong participated in this three-month…

Despite substantial scholarship relating to word structure (Anderson, 2018), for English affixes the relationship between productivity, genre, and second language (L2) learning remains unclear. Analysis of the existing literature reveals that deadjectival noun suffixes (i.e., nouns derived from adjectives such as "appropriacy" or…

Purpose: Children with poor language tend to have worse psychosocial outcomes compared to their typically developing peers. The most common explanations for such adversities focus on developmental psychological processes whereby poor language triggers psychosocial difficulties. Here, we investigate the possibility of shared biological effects by…

Language and accent strongly influence the formation of social groups. By five years of age, children already show strong social preferences for peers who speak their native language with a familiar accent (Kinzler, Shutts, DeJesus, & Spelke, 2009). However, little is known about the factors that modulate the strength and direction of…

Factors that affect comprehension of accented English (e.g., Harding, 2011) have been well studied, but little research examines how listeners' proficiency affects their sensitivity to second language (L2) accent. The current study investigated the effect of test takers' English proficiency on their comprehension ratings and ability to correctly…

This essay investigates the classroom talk and reflections of a Year 5 lesson on reading and writing beyond Standard English. Its title refers to 'Reflecting Realities', the CLPE survey of ethnic diversity in UK children's books. In changing 'reflecting' to 'representing' I seek to move beyond concern with sourcing representative texts to the work…

This study aims to explore how corpus-based approaches can be used to address the distinctions of English near-synonyms effectively. Especially, it collected source data from the British National Corpus (BNC) and adopted Sketch Engine (SkE) as an analyzing tool to compare the near synonymous pair "damage" and "destroy" commonly…

These days, many pre-service and in-service language English language teachers now complete at least part of their professional training overseas. There is, thus, an important question concerning the impact of intercultural encounters on teachers' perspectives towards the English language and the teaching of English. This paper reports on a study…

The paper titled "Nominal Group as Qualifier to 'Someone'" investigated types of qualifiers which are embedded to the head "someone" in a nominal group. This research was conducted in the light of Systemic Functional Linguistics analysis. The data was analyzed, classified then described using descriptive qualitative method.…

Since the 1990s, grammatical complexity is a topic that has received considerable attention in various fields of applied linguistics, such as English for academic purposes, second language acquisition, language testing, and second language writing (Bulte & Housen, 2012). Many scholars in applied linguistics have recently argued that…

The Bailiwick of Guernsey is a small, semi-autonomous archipelago in the English Channel. Although it is a British Crown dependency and part of the British Isles, it has its own parliament and does not belong to the United Kingdom or the European Union. This unusual geopolitical situation means that the nation-state has little relevance. It is…

This study is one of the pioneers in investigating and analyzing the orthographical conventions/norms of the outer circle Asian Englishes using one of the largest databases of English corpus, the Global Web-based English (GloWbE). This study extends the analysis of the current orthographical norms of the new varieties to their colonial parents.…