Symposia & Conferences
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Item Including all: Perceptions of mainstream teachers on inclusive education in the Western Province of Sri Lanka(Faculty of Humanities, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2016) Hettiarachchi, S.; Das, A.; Ranaweera, M.; Attanayake, L.D.; Walisundara, D.The changes made to the local constitution (Parliament of Sri Lanka, 1997), the ratification of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UN, 2005) in 2016 and the first World Report on Disability (WHO, 2011) support a new era for the education of children with disabilities in Sri Lanka. The emphasis of this legislation is the inclusion and full participation of students with disabilities in regular schools. It guarantees non-discrimination and removal of barriers, both physical and psychological or attitudinal; to facilitate the inclusion of students with disabilities into regular schools. It urges policy makers, educators, parents and other service providers to consider the premise that special education should be seen not in the context of separate education but as an integral part of regular education. Arguably, the success of implementing a policy of inclusive education requires mainstream school teachers to understand, accept and be competent at supporting students with disabilities within the mainstream classroom context. To uncover perceptions of ‘inclusive education’ among mainstream teachers. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 mainstream teachers from the Western Province using a topic guide. Thematic coding of the interview data was undertaken using the key principles of Framework Analysis (Ritchie & Spencer, 1994). The main themes to emerge were of incongruous conceptual understandings, fear of incompetence, limited training facilities and the lack of incentives. These findings will be discussed with regard to its implications for policy and practice. The results underpin the need to consider local teacher perceptions and to address these concerns within pre-service and in-service training in order to support the establishment of education reforms, which are relevant and sensitive to the cultural needs and cognizant of local realities.Item Colour me…orange? : Incorporating Aspects of the Colourful Semantics Approach into English as a Second Language Lessons at Preschool(Department of Linguistics, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2016) Hettiarachchi, S.; Walisundara, D.; Ranaweera, M.Among the challenges faced by Sri Lankan children learning English as an additional or second language is the accuracy of word order and vocabulary knowledge. The Colourful Semantics approach (Bryan, 2008) has been used successfully in the UK and in Australia with children experiencing language-learning difficulties (Bennington, 2011; Chiat, Law, Marshall & Bryan, 1997), with many programmes devised by Speech and Language Therapists (Morrissy, 2010; Wade, 2009). It uses thematic roles and a colour-coding system to support the development of syntax through a semantic route. The aim of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of using aspects of Colourful Semantics to develop vocabulary knowledge and the use of Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) structures in young learners of English. Twenty preschool children in ESL classrooms were included in the study. Key aspects of Colourful Semantics were introduced as a whole-class approach using children‟s storybooks, colour-coding and signing with lessons offered once a week for 12 weeks together with supplementary activities. Pre- and post-intervention measures were undertaken on five receptive and expressive language and literacy measures of vocabulary and syntax. In this presentation we will discuss the programme offered, the pre- and post-intervention assessment scores and statistical results on vocabulary and discuss the benefits of incorporating aspects of the Colourful Semantics approach into the English language teaching classroom.Item Role and Place of Academic Research in the Face of Information Explosion(Faculty of Humanities, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2016) Hettiarachchi, S.The focus of this keynote address is on the sustainable importance of academic research with the unprecedented growth of information technology. Formidable challenge for the researcher is to identify information from research inundated with the flooding of information and the voracious human appetite for it. Scholarly research within the academia, such as universities and institutes as well as Research and Development Units within the workforce carry the responsibility to engage in serious investigation. However, the inadequate resources, lack of training, dearth of personnel have created a void in new research within the Arts and Humanities, resulting in disinterest and motivation and has rendered the capacity for innovative academic research virtually defunct. The workforce which is de facto a key product of research, suffer from multiple psychosocial issues and seek supplementary avenues to address the social and interpersonal deficits. Hence, concerted research must be encouraged both within the Sciences and the Arts and Humanities for a right balance.Item A Comparative Study of Language Skills in Young Men With and Without Traumatic Brain Injury(University of Kelaniya, 2015) Hettiarachchi, S.Traumatic brain injury (TBI) impacts among other skills on attention, orientation, cognition, communication and higher executive functions such as problem solving (ASHA, n.d.). The primary aim of the study was to explore the effects of focal brain injury on Sinhala soldiers. Ten soldiers following shrapnel head injuries (experimental groups-five right-hemisphere and five left-hemisphere) and their carers and five young men without head injuries (control group), all within the age of 20 to 35 years were included in the study. Language data were collected via a picture description task consisting of three target pictures from participants of both groups and data was gathered from a conversational task between the participants of the experimental groups and a caregiver using a question guide. The language data was analyzed qualitatively to document its syntactic structure and analyzed quantitatively on the syntactic category words produced by the two groups via one-way ANOVAs. In the control group, there was a trend towards higher mean scores on all five syntactic category variables and use of more complex syntax in comparison to the experimental groups. The one-way ANOVAs performed indicated a highly significant difference between the three groups of participants on the number of utterances (F (2, 14) = 13.65, p<0.005), the range of syntactic structures (F (2, 14) = 23.63, p<0.001) and syntactic complexity (F (2, 14) = 21.56, p<0.001). While reduced syntactic category words and structural differences were indicated in the picture description task for the experimental groups, the features perceived by the carers as hindering communication were non-linguistic such as articulation, memory and psychosocial difficulties.Reduced syntactic complexity and range and paucity of utterance were noted for the two experimental groups in comparison to the control group, in-line with literature on English. However, in contrast, the left-hemisphere group did not omit or produce fewer main verbs compared to the control group and the right-hemisphere head injury group indicated a paucity of nouns, main verbs, adjectives and adverbs. Scrambled word order and subject/object deletion were not perceived as disrupting communication by the carers.Item New and Home-grown: A Postcolonial Approach to ‘Theology in Context’(University of Kelaniya, 2015) Hettiarachchi, S.The paper focuses on the significance of ‘context’ to theology and how the postcolonial perspective could be deployed to reassess theology in context informed by praxis. The South Asian landmass and its people were subjugated by various regimes and nothing of it remained untouched by ‘colonialism’ and continues with its residue to this day. It enforced political contour and determined governance and land, from spices to religion, alliance, allegiance and loyalty to the powers that be in the distant theatres. Theology became a ‘handmaid’ of the empire which framed history, creating new socio-political, religio-cultural domains close to their home but impacting upon the ‘colony’ and its masses they governed. There is an unfinished debate on the place, role, mode and model of theology since the end of the colonial world with freedom movements and the national quest for identity, a sense of ‘peoplehood’ as if ‘lost and found’. However, theology being part of the historical development of the churches whose prime concern has been to be faithful to ‘their context of splintered church doctrine and practice’ with less or no regard to the ‘new context of the heathens’ where they ‘pitched their tents’ which prioritised ‘planting of churches’ and ‘salvation of souls’. Evolving a theology without a context could even leave ‘God’ endangered because God too gathers meaning in context. Therefore, contextual theology is not an option but an imperative for the churches of Asia to make sense of the ‘difference’ where ‘oneness’ and ‘manyness’ of ‘religion(s)’ require insightful reading and fresh understanding. Postcolonial perspective as a tool, critically pursues to recover, re-index and re-codify terms of reference and strategies of engagement, with the plurality of context of the Christians in Asia. It also helps provide content to theology in context and opens new frontiers to the Asian theological intellect.Item Constructing ‘disabilities’ and ‘inclusion’: An explanatory models of disability and inclusive education among teachers in Sri Lanka(University of Kelaniya, 2015) Hettiarachchi, S.; Ranaweera, M.; Walisundara, D.The current thrust towards implementing ‘inclusive education’, which is ‘the integration and education of most students with disabilities in general education classes’ (Field, 1998 in Eleweke & Rodda, 2002) poses many challenges in a resource poor country. Arguably, one challenge may be the perceptions, constructs and explanations of disability held by teachers, which could influence their openness to embrace inclusion. The aim of this study is to uncover the constructs, beliefs, attitudes, explanatory models of ‘disabilities’ and inclusive education among teachers. 60 teachers (30 from special schools; 30 from mainstream schools) were interviewed using an interview guide. The interview data were analyzed using the key features of Framework Analysis (Ritchie and Spencer, 1994). In the main findings, the teacher explanations of disability reflected a religio-cultural framework and to a lesser extent, a medical model. While the teachers within special educational facilities asserted the need to offer special educational support, the teachers in mainstream echoed the same view, stressing that these students are better placed within special educational rather than mainstream educational contexts within inclusive education. However, these explanations were not framed within a social model or rights-based model of disability, reflecting a limited understanding of the disability movement. The findings reveal that there is a need for pre-service and in-service training programmes for teachers to include information on the current explanatory models of disability, the need to acknowledge students with disabilities as equal and comprehensive training on mainstreaming children with disabilities within mainstream schools if inclusive education is to be successfully offered across the country.