Browsing by Author "Kavindi, R."

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    Myths And Ideas On Learning English Speech In Pinnawala, Sri Lanka
    (, Proceedings of the Undergraduate Research Symposium (HUG 2018), Department of English Language Teaching, Faculty of Humanities, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2018) Dilhara, S.; Herath, N.; Kavindi, R.
    English speech has been given a lot of prominence in Sri Lanka in the ESL context. In the recent past, English was introduced as a life skill and is taught from grade one to grade eleven and is offered as a compulsory language for the Ordinary Level Examination. As only written skills are tested in the examination, students do not concentrate on developing their oral proficiency. As a result, some ESL learners carry various ideas regarding learning English speech. Some of them, which are myths, are passed down from one generation to another. Hence, this research paper attempts to explore the myths and attitudes of Sri Lankan ESL learners regarding English speech. As the research study is qualitative it is conducted through interviews. 15 students from Grade 11 were selected for this study from Pinnawala Central College, randomly. Also, in order to see if some of these myths have been passed down from one generation to another and 3 teachers from different disciplines from the same school were interviewed. The results show that some myths have been passed down from generation to generation and overall there are many negative ideas related to learning English speech.
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    Using the bottom-up approach for Listening activities in Grade Six ESL classroom in Asgiriya Junior Model School, Gampaha
    (Proceedings of the Undergraduate Research Symposium (HUG 2019), Department of English Language Teaching, Faculty of Humanities, University of Kelaniya. Sri Lanka, 2019) Dilhara, S.; Herath, N.; Kavindi, R.
    Listening is one of the four major skills of learning a language. Teaching listening is a challenging task especially when the students have a lesser exposure to the target language. It is found that listening is not taught due to various reasons; especially due to a shortage of audio equipment, disturbance of adjoining classes, a large number of student population in classrooms in schools. Moreover, there is no prescribed learner-friendly approach to teach listening. As a result, the students have very poor exposure to listening skills. Therefore, a case study was conducted focusing on a school in a rural setting in Gampaha district, with the objective of finding a suitable approach to teach listening in the ESL classroom. The study was done with a sample of ten grade six students in Asgiriya Junior Model School. The students were given a simple listening test and were divided into two groups as the experimental and the control group based on the test marks. The control group was taught two units from grade six English textbooks and the bottom-up approach (using the incoming output as the basis for understanding the message (Richards, 2008)) was employed for the experimental group to teach the same lessons. All the lessons were conducted using English and the students were encouraged to use only English in the classroom. After a week, a common test was held to evaluate whether there was an improvement in the experimental group. A notable improvement was seen in the experimental group. Hence, the bottom-up approach can be considered an effective way of teaching listening in the ESL context.