"Changing English" is a new feature in "ELT Journal" which aims to illustrate the diversity of English in the world today and to ask whether, and how, ELT practitioners might accommodate such variation. Focusing on a particular language issue in each article, the series will explore how English varies between places and spaces,…

According to some accounts, the linguistic reality of stress-timing in English is questionable and the existence of this type of language rhythm is rejected as a perceptual illusion. In this article, the temporal characteristics of English are re-analysed in the light of current linguistic research, and a range of implications for pronunciation…

Learner attributions, perceived causes of success and failure, have received little attention in EFL research. Attributions are categorized as either internal (for example effort) or external (for example luck) and may affect how students learn about and impose order on their world. We investigated the attributions of 505 university students in…

Describes research in which a group of proficient speakers of a second language were tested in their ability to identify individual words taken from spoken discourse in both their native language and their second language. Results show that, on the average, they were more proficient in identifying words in their second rather than their first…

The 1959 Survey of English Usage has provided researchers and teachers with a corpus of spoken, manuscript, and printed Standard British English. New uses have been found for the survey's resources in recent years, and the spoken part is more widely available in book and computer tape form. (MSE)

Data in the Survey of English Usage are useful not only for frequency counts but also usage information not normally obtained from introspective analyses of self-made examples or from study of existing grammars or handbooks. Some of these findings are relevant to ESL teaching or syllabus writing. Examples are given. (MSE)