Browsing by Author "Abeysena, H."

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    Challenges Encountered by the Grade Six Students in learning Health and Physical Education in Bilingual Class Rooms in Selected Schools in The Western Province
    (University of Kelaniya, 2015) Abeysena, H.
    This study is a survey conducted on the ‘Challenges Encountered by The Grade Six Students in Learning Health and Physical Education in Bilingual Class Rooms in Selected Schools in The Western Province’. In this survey, the sample is the grade six BEL students, teachers (L2, BELT) of Health Science, parents and principals of the selected three schools belonging to the Maharagama Educational division and Sri Jayawardenapura zone in Sri Lanka. Both qualitative and quantitative methods were used and four different questionnaires were administered among those four sample groups and formal and informal interviews were conducted during a period of three months of this research with thorough classroom observation and data collecting.Final results of this survey’s data analysis show that the majority of the BEL s uses their L1 (mainly Sinhala) for meaningful comprehension of the subject based content during their primary education in their L1.It is quite disheartening that in secondary education BEL s inability to pay their attention to English as a subject in formal curriculum is one of the causal factors for not reaching their full capacity in BE. Consequently, they are doubly challenged by the struggle they encounter with the new subject knowledge and their striving hard to improve their L2, which is English, for which they seek help from L1 more than required with over used code switching and code mixing in class rooms. In this regard, they need considerable greater amount of time to adapt to communicate and comprehend the content area. Further, the majority of the bilingual education teachers were identified as having a lack of L2 command, which again challenges the bilingual education pedagogy. Since they do not have adequate opportunities in their domestic and social environment to utilize English, plus their disappointment over this and lack of confidence in their endeavor to continue pursuing their future studies in the same BEL context, the researcher found the following. Firstly, there is a need to recommend more coordination between the English language teachers and bilingual education teachers teaching the relevant subject content. The need for more capacity building programs conducted for these teachers and teacher trainers should be carried out by the Ministry of Education and the National Institute of Education. These programs should cover knowledge, skills, and attitudes and soft skills development along with the English language improvement for these stakeholders. The required physical and physiological resources, such as books, IT equipment and trained teachers should be provided to urban and rural areas to help and promote more avenues in bilingual education across the country. While acknowledging the usage of the L1 as a feasible tool for BEL s, to make them more competent CLIL s, the need of the day is to eliminate the misconceptions and unnecessary fear and obstacles for bilingual education. In this context, where the BEL and the education system demand both the subject knowledge and L2, it is also necessary to ensure there is adequate L2 teaching support.
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    Diversity in the Varieties of Global English Used in the Current Ethnic Setting of Sri Lanka, from an Ecological Perspective
    (University of Kelaniya, 2015) Abeysena, H.
    This paper explores the unique nature of super diversity in the varieties of English spoken in the current ethnic setting of Sri Lanka. Since, historically Sri Lanka has been colonized thrice respectively by the Portuguese, Dutch and British, the impact bestowed by the British colonization from 1796 until the fall of the Kandyan kingdom in 1815 is noteworthy. With a lot of socio economic and socio political and linguistic changes occurred in the course of time for many centuries, paving the way for English to merge with several local languages such as Sinhala and Tamil along with productively being used by diverse ethnicities as in Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims and Burghers, standard and sub standard varieties of English have been emerged. Thus, the researcher has analyzed disciplinary aspects that she has encountered in this study such as Sri Lankan English in the public domain, Sri Lankan English in English Language Teaching and Sri Lankan English literature at a local exposure with the sample of about 60 undergraduates in a national university in the country for a period of about six months. With such a historical background of English which has been existing in the country for more than 21 years maintaining a peculiar position as a lingua franca, according to Prof. Manique Gunesekara (2010), ‘In Sri Lanka today, most people are quite happy to speak English, and are not interested in which variety they speak. This attitude is spurred by the immense power of English in today’s postcolonial Sri Lanka. “The importance of advocating a standard for the language” in terms of Sri Lankan English has been reiterated by many academics especially in a challenging ELT class room setting in a context, where “many Englishes” idea have been accommodated (Wasala,2010) Sri Lankan English and Standard Sri Lankan English also shown further sub standards of the language such as Malay English, Sinhala English and Tamil English and also the type varied in terms of the user’s home town with their own distinguished characteristics as morphology and syntax with their unique practices. However, this variation does not block a local’s understanding of the communication taking place. According to 45 students of the total, while the controversy has been prevailing for decades now whether to believe in such an existence of sub varieties and accommodating them or not in their day to day academic and professional work, the researcher found out that it is proven to be a very creative and productive process throughout, but the need for validation is a compulsion of the day, since the student population has faced a considerable difficulty in following the ‘best practice’.