Browsing by Author "Premawardhena, N.S."

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Aspects of intercultural communication in Foreign Language Teaching in Sri Lanka
(University of Kelaniya, 2005) Premawardhena, N.S.
Foreign language teaching in the present day strives to promote an intercultural approach to language teaching in order to create an awareness of the interplay between language and culture. It is noteworthy that there is a remarkable increase in the demand for learning foreign languages in Sri Lanka. Among the most sought after languages are Japanese, Hindi, French and German followed by Chinese, Korean, Spanish, Italian and Russian. Albeit the teaching methodology adopted by each language may vary, the aim of all learners is to acquire competency in the target language in the shortest possible time. This paper attempts to discuss the importance and effectiveness of integrating intercultural communication to foreign language teaching in Sri Lanka, examining the conditions, opportunities and limitations in an intercultural approach to teaching foreign languages. Further, this paper examines how one’s own cultural background influences language learning ability with examples drawn from Sinhala native speakers. Since the introduction of the communicative competence approach to foreign language teaching a few decades ago, the attention has shifted from imparting purely linguistic skills to the much broader field of teaching a language within its socio-cultural dimensions. The latest theories in this discipline emphasise the need to expose learners to all socio-linguistic variants of the target language virtually from the very first lesson. However, since by definition, foreign language teaching takes place outside the target-language speech community, learning confined to the classroom environment offer students less opportunities to practice the different linguistic registers with native speakers. The greater the geographic distance between the speech communities, the more difficult the task becomes. An understanding of one’s own language and culture is required to observe similarities and differences in the target language. Thus intercultural communication also helps learners to increase an awareness of their own culture. However, data collected from teachers and students of foreign languages in Sri Lanka, do not reflect a significant awareness among the teachers of the effectiveness of integrating intercultural communication in foreign language teaching. It is expected that an understanding of the intercultural barriers in language teaching would contribute to minimizing the learning difficulties of students of foreign languages in Sri Lanka.
Integrating ICT in foreign language teaching: A Sri Lankan experience
(University of Kelaniya, 2005) Premawardhena, N.S.; de Silva, C.H.
Foreign language learning has become increasingly popular in Sri Lanka during the past few decades. This study discusses the significant contribution ICT could make to foreign language teaching in Sri Lanka. Native speakers are born with the competence to grasp the language(s) spoken and used in the environment they grow up. However complicated the phonetic, phonological, syntactic or semantic structure of the particular language(s) may appear to an outsider, the native speaker acquires it with such ease and competence, which makes human language ability a unique phenomenon. The foreign language learner has to acquire this language competency with much effort. Thus it is the task of the foreign language teacher to impart the language knowledge effectively to minimise the difficulties faced by the learner. Furthermore, an integral part of learning a foreign language is, understanding the culture and lifestyle of the particular speech community. The limited number of hours devoted to class room teaching is not sufficient to acquire a language or impart knowledge required to master the finer points, mainly the cultural and sociolinguistic aspects of a language. The use of idioms, figures of speech, proverbs, and sociolinguistic variables, for instance, demand a deeper knowledge of understanding than learning the basic rules of grammar and vocabulary of a language. This paper discusses how the integration of ICT could improve language teaching and pave way for more effective skills in foreign language acquisition. Thus the aim of the study is to find the effectiveness of technology enhanced foreign language teaching comprising language learning software, speech synthesis, web-based technology, virtual platforms for seminars and exchange of information and multimedia content. The study focuses mainly on data available from two pilot projects conducted at University of Kelaniya in integrating ICT in foreign language teaching at elementary, intermediate and advanced levels. However, it is expected that the results obtained will benefit foreign language teaching in Sri Lanka at large and reach a wider audience to encourage the use of ICT in language teaching more effectively in the future.