Junior Research Symposia
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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.Item The actual use of honorifics in Japanese: focusing on Sri Lankan university students(Faculty of Humanities, University of Kelaniya, 2015) Rajapaksha, K.A.In linguistics, an honorific is a grammatical form that encodes the relative social status of the participants of the conversation. Honorifics involve changing the way one speaks as a result of the relationship between two people and the setting of the conversation. In Japanese language many honorifics can be found as a part of speech which shows the respect, and their use is mandatory in many social situations. Honorifics in Japanese used to emphasize social distance or disparity in rank, or to emphasize the social intimacy or similarity in rank. Japanese can be roughly separated into three levels of politeness: casual, polite, and honorific/humble. And the most important factor to remember is that the speaker always considers himself/herself to be at the lowest level. When non-native speakers learn Japanese language, it is impossible to avoid the honorific, because it is a very important way of expressing the politeness to the others in Japan. But, honorifics are one of the difficult parts of Japanese for Japanese learners. Furthermore, the complexity of the honorific system in Japanese constitutes a special difficulty for foreign learners, not only in terms of the range of expressions available, but also with regard to the underlying input features which determine selection and use. The purpose of this research is to find the actual use of honorifics of Sri Lankan university students. Researches have been done on honorific expressions targeting Japanese people in different angles. So far, there has been no research conducted regarding Japanese learners in Sri Lanka. Therefore a survey on honorific expressions was conducted mainly focusing on the university students who are learning Japanese at the University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka. In this research University students were divided into five categories. Those are (1) First year students, (2) Second year students, (3) Third year students, (4) Special Second year students and (5) Students who visited Japan. The major finding was the knowledge of the honorific expressions of the students who visited Japan was comparatively high than the other students. The results of the survey reveal the awareness and actual use of honorific expressions of the students who learn Japanese in the University level.