Autocorrect is not working for Huawei Ascend G600 (U8950N)

I just bought a new Huawei (running Ice Cream Sandwich). When I use the keyboard (both the Android and Huawei IME), the photo does not recognise any common words in English, and so it underlines them all as errors. It recognises the names from my contacts, but not the main dictionary. I could, over time, add the whole English language to my personalized words list, but I would rather not! Any suggestions for the problem?