ICLSL 2015
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://repository.kln.ac.lk/handle/123456789/10221
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Item The Role of Psycholinguistics Knowledge in Improving Proficiency in L2(University of Kelaniya, 2015) Ravindran, S.During the last two decades listening comprehension has received considerable attention, in the fields of applied linguistics, psycholinguistics and second language pedagogy. Listening is a complex cognitive process, in which the listener constructs the meaning using both the linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge. This study attempts to find out how psycholinguistic knowledge facilitates in improving proficiency in L2 listening skills. It is hypothesized that the psycholinguistic elements which are involved in listening skills could be introduced to both the teachers and learners to obtain mastery in the skills. A convenient sample of forty five, first year students from the Faculty of Arts were randomly selected as sample fro the study. The data collection was done by questionnaire survey and teachers’ observation. A qualitative analysis was carried out to gather information and to analyze data. Through the analysis it was found that the role of Psycholinguistic knowledge in improving proficiency in L2 listening skills is indispensable to obtain proficiency in listening skills. This study recommends that the learners need to familiarize the psycholinguistic elements which are indispensable for the improvement in the listening skill proficiency. Finally the undergraduates of the university with less proficiency in listening skills could be facilitated and enabled to improve their proficiency in listening skills.Item Error Analysis: An Investigation of the Writing of English as a Second Language(University of Kelaniya, 2015) Wijeratne, W.M.; Jeyaseelan, S.Errors are significant in the teaching and learning process of English as Second Language learners. Error analysis is a useful practice in second language learning because it reveals the problematic areas to teachers, syllabus designers and text book writers. Therefore, it is mandatory for teachers to summarize these frequently appearing errors, and stress to students of these errors as often as possible so that they can make greater effort to avoid them and improve their writing. The purpose of this study was to investigate the errors committed in using the articles, the past tense and the irregular past tense made by Vavuniya Campus first year English as Second Language learners in their English writings. For this study seventy-two students were taken as a sample and the same number of scripts were collected as a data and analyzed. Based on the Corder’s error analysis method the data was analyzed qualitatively. The findings reveal these errors are mainly caused by over-generalization. Intralingual errors occur due to the difficulty and irregular nature of the English language. Further, the failure to learn, understand the concept and use grammatical elements highlights the excessive use of the articles and irregular past tense in their writing. This study reveals that the performance of the Sri Lankan university students in the use of the rules of grammatical morphemes in concrete entities and events are yet to be improved. This poses a serious problem in using the grammatical morphemes with abstract entities and events of management discipline with sophisticated linguistic and theoretical expressions at the tertiary level. To be sustainable, this recommendation has to be implemented at the school level as well.Item Correlational Study – The Role of Receptive Language Skills in the Acquisition of Productive Skills; Teaching English as a Second Language (ESL)(University of Kelaniya, 2015) Lakshani, W.G.J.P.As Krashen suggests in his “input hypothesis” productive language skills (speaking and writing) evolve from the receptive skills (listening and reading) and, thus, they should be given more attention in the acquisition of a second language (Krashen, 1985). However, there is only limited research-based evidence to prove this correlation between the receptive and productive language skills. The primary question intended to find answers for in the present research was if effective receptive language skills reinforce better productive skills, in learning English as a second language. Thus, in order to explore any possible correlations between these two categories methodically, corresponding test scores of fifty ESL learners were analyzed in the research. Test scores of undergraduates in a placement test conducted for English were recorded for all four skills respectively. In order to avoid significant deviations in the score ranges the marks of students categorized under the same proficiency level; intermediate, were taken in to account. The scores of the two receptive skills; reading, listening and the productive skills; writing, speaking were totaled separately and an average mark for each category of skills was given for every student. Finally, the average scores each student has got for the two varieties of skills were analyzed using Pearson correlation co-efficient measures. A moderate positive correlation was found out between the average scores for the receptive and productive skills in the student sample. Conclusively, it is apparent that the findings of the research solidify the notion, that sound proficiency in the receptive skills paves the way for better writing and speaking skills in learning English a second language.Item Acquisition of English Prepositions in Writing by ESL Learners(University of Kelaniya, 2015) Jayasinghe, R.R.English prepositions are difficult for ESL (English as a second language) learners mainly for two reasons: (1) The cross linguistic variations between L1 and L2 (first language and second language). (2) The polysemy of English prepositions where they are used to denote a wide range of meanings in different perspectives. Littlefield (2006) has investigated four categories of prepositions through the analysis of naturalistic speech of five English speaking first language children (aged 1;2-2;3) as follows: Adverbial prepositions [+Lexical, -Functional], Particles [-Lexical,-Functional], Semi-lexical prepositions [+Lexical, +Functional], Functional prepositions [-Lexical, +Functional]. Littlefield also has shown that the acquisition of categories of prepositions with [–Functional] features rank higher than the categories of prepositions with [+ Functional] features. She considered as [+Lexical] those that contribute semantic content, and as [+Functional] those that are able to check Case of their complements. The present study sets to examine the acquisition of prepositions by Sinhala speaking learners of English with respect to Littlefield (2006) findings. It investigates whether the same ranking in acquisition of the four categories of prepositions can be validated by the Sinhala speaking ESL learners’ responses in a writing task. A picture story writing task in which the prepositions needed to be abundantly used was utilized in order to collect elicited production data from 40 students of Grade 4 who were randomly selected from two government schools. Quantitative statistical analysis using SPSS was used to find out whether there were significant differences between the acquisition of each set of two different categories out of these four categories of prepositions. If prepositions with [-Functional / +Lexical] feature rank higher than the prepositions with [+Functional /-Lexical] feature respectively, relevant order can be used as a guideline in the ESL class-room to facilitate teaching of prepositions through writing tasks.