Junior Research Symposia
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Item The Attitudes of Sri Lankan Urban and Rural Advanced Level Students Towards Spoken English(Department of English, Faculty of Humanities, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2016) Bandara, U.; Ekanayake, R.; de Alwis, L.; Dias, M.; Marikkar, M.R.F.R.Proficiency in a language instruments both writing skills and speaking ability. Though the second language learners exert much time and effort in learning English, mastering the language is quite challenging. It varies according to the language community, social background, pedagogy used to teach and some other aspects such as socio-linguistic factors. This study attempts to focus on the attitudes of Sri Lankan urban and rural Advanced Level students towards spoken English. The study was carried out through a combination of both qualitative and quantitative methodologies which is known as “triangulation”. This was used to compare and contrast the attitudes of the research participants who represent rural and urban social backgrounds in Sri Lanka. The cluster sampling and convenience sampling were appropriate as this research was conducted in two major schools that represented the urban and rural areas in Sri Lanka. The findings of the research study suggests that unlike the students in urban schools, the majority of the students in rural schools encounter challenges in speaking English which includes fluency and subject knowledge such as grammar and vocabulary. Nevertheless, this study points out that the majority of the participants have the attitude that English is a basic qualification that should be fulfilled to acquire a better career.Item Awareness and the Attitudes towards Sri Lankan English among Undergraduates(English Language Teaching Unit, Faculty of Humanities, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2016) Ariyasinghe, D.This study examines dialects 1-3 based on the pronunciation of the back vowels in the typology of Sri Lankan English (SLE) by Siromi Fernando (2006) across the selected phonemes /ei/, /z/, /θ/, /ʒ/ and /oʊ/. The methodology included online questionnaires/interviews and voice recordings of 50 undergraduates, mean age 22 years, from diverse disciplines in universities and institutes in Sri Lanka and abroad. 05 of the participants were case studies. The findings identified that a fairly large undergraduate population declare that the variety of English they speak is either Standard British English or American English thus belonging to dialect 3. But analysis of the podcasts evidenced that in the selected pronunciation areas examined SLE characteristics are indicated. In the usage of identified morphological processes too they retained SLE characteristics. Analyzing the Likert scale measurements for awareness and the attitude towards the variety it was clearly visible that both of the aforementioned factors distinctly differ according to the discipline the undergraduates follow at the universities. The attitude towards speaking SLE in undergraduates especially from Sciences, unless they are exposed to the background of Social Sciences or Humanities, was negative. Their belief of the inadequacy of SLE for communication with native speakers was the cause for their negativity. Further there was a lack of awareness in this population that SLE is a standard variety of English. On the contrary, the students who are from Social Sciences or Humanities backgrounds were aware and were proud to use Standard Sri Lankan English. Conclusively it can be stated that dialect 3 is becoming more powerful and influential among the Sri Lankan undergraduate populations. Moreover, it can be recommended to introduce SLE as a standard variety in undergraduate English programs, especially for the undergraduates are from Science backgrounds, in order to increase their confidence.