Instructors’ Awareness of the Syntactic and Morphological Differences between British and American English

Abstract

This study explores Turkish English as a foreign language (EFL) instructors’ awareness of the syntactic and morphological variation in British English (BrE) and American English (AmE). The data were collected through a survey which was administered to 38 EFL instructors working at preparatory schools of different universities. The participants were asked to analyze 49 sentence-pairs in the survey to decide whether given sentences were correct or incorrect. The results indicated a) that the participants were better at recognizing the morphology and syntax of BrE than AmE, b) that of all the participants, the ones who were exposed to both varieties were better at recognizing the different uses of the syntactic and morphological forms in BrE and AmE than the ones exposing to the forms only in one variety, c) that the departments the participants graduated from did not have an impact on the recognition of the differences between BrE and AmE in syntax and morphology.