Symposia and Conferences
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Item Accuracy in the Usage of Direct and Indirect Speech in Learning English as a Second Language: Tertiary Level(19th Conference on Postgraduate Research, International Postgraduate Research Conference 2018, Faculty of Graduate Studies,University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2018) Jayasinghe, R.R.Direct speech in English Language refers to quoted speech, for example, Rani said, “I visited my uncle yesterday.” Indirect speech refers to reported speech, for example, Rani said that she had visited her uncle on the previous day. When direct speech is converted into indirect speech, there are some fundamental changes to be made: changing the tense of the verb, the punctuation marks and references in time, pronoun, etc. Due to these complex rules, there is a possibility that the learners of English as a Second Language (ESL) would find difficult to convert direct speech into indirect speech successfully. The objectives of this study are: to find out whether there are significantly different areas in converting direct speech into indirect speech where all the 12 tenses of verbs in English language are concerned; to examine the percentages of the accurate usage of the punctuation marks and references in time, place, and pronoun in both direct and indirect speech. Total number of 50 first year students, randomly selected from the Faculty of Science, University of Kelaniya, participated in this study. Twelve sentences in direct speech, each carrying one tense out of 12 tenses of verbs in English Language were provided to these students to convert into indirect speech, and vice versa. SPSS-21was used to analyse the correct usage of verb, punctuation marks, and the references in time, place and the pronoun in the direct and indirect speech. An ANNOVA was run, and the Tukey’s HSD test showed that there are significant differences in the correct use of verb across the 12 tenses in both direct and indirect speech. The findings concluded that there are considerable difficulties for these students in the use of verbs, punctuation marks and the references in direct and indirect speech. These findings can be used to facilitate teaching direct and indirect speech for ESL students at the tertiary level.Item Error Analysis on the Usage of Prepositions by the ESL Learners in Writing Tasks(Faculty of Graduate Studies, University of Kelaniya, 2015) Jayasinghe, R.R.This study examines the patterns of three types of errors: omission errors, substitution errors and addition errors in the usage of prepositions by ESL (English as a Second Language) leaners in writing tasks. The study investigates the following: whether the school children in lower grades tend to omit prepositions more often than in higher grades whereas in higher grades, they substitute prepositions more often than in lower grades; whether omission errors are more in [+Functional] prepositions than in [+Lexical] prepositions; and whether the category criterion will be preserved in substitutions. Sinhala speaking ESL learners make errors in prepositions mainly due to cross-linguistic differences between their first and second languages, and as a result, many difficulties occur in ESL teaching. A pool of 260 Sinhala students from four grades (Grade 4, Grade 6, Grade 8 and Grade 10) of two government schools in Sri Lanka participated in this study, and the Survey Method was followed to collect data. A picture story writing task where prepositions needed to be abundantly used was administered to these students and they were instructed to identify the story depicted in the pictures and to present it in writing. The errors in each prepositional category: Adverbial prepositions, Semi-lexical prepositions, Particles and Functional prepositions were counted. Each error was further categorized as omission, substitution and addition. Percentage of each error type in each grade was calculated to find out which error types were most frequent and for which category. Substitution errors were further analyzed to see whether substitutions respected categorical distinctions. Quantitative analysis was carried out using SPSS 2012, and interaction effects and category-wise analysis were computed. Findings concluded that there were more omission errors in the lower grades and more substitution errors in higher grades, and the learners generally respected the category rule in their substitutions. These findings can be used in the ESL classroom to facilitate teaching English prepositions.Item An Analysis of Syntactic Errors of the Undergraduates Who Study English as a Second Language(University of Kelaniya, 2007) Jayasinghe, R.R.The system of rules and categories that underlies sentence formation is called syntax. As Corder (1973: 167) noted: "Errors provide feedback to the teacher on effectiveness of the teaching material, teaching techniques and show what part of the syllabus has been inadequately learned or taught." In Error Analysis, samples of learner language are collected and errors are identified, described and classified according to their hypothesized reasons. In the Faculty of Commerce and Management of the University of Kelaniya, the first year students study English as a Second Language and they follow a course titled "English for Business Communication", which is compulsory to complete their degree. With fourteen years of experience in English language teaching, the researcher has noticed that there are some individual variances in sources of errors, indicated by students' performance in English language learning. Also it has been observed that the knowledge in syntax is crucial in their examinations and assignments. Therefore the analysis of errors of ESL students in the Faculty of Commerce and Management would be useful and worthwhile. The paper focuses on the syntactic errors of about 40 randomly selected first year Commerce and Management students and they were given a questionnaire to find out their difficulties in syntax of English language. The necessary data will be obtained by analyzing the students' errors in their written work. The descriptive method will be used and statistical analysis will follow to identify the sources of errors. At the conclusion of this investigation, remedial measures will be discussed, and some suggestions for teaching ESL will be proposed in this context.Item Reliability of Language Tests (Speech and Written) - First Year Students in Commerce and Management Faculty(University of Kelaniya, 2005) Jayasinghe, R.R.A test, like any other type of instrument used to measure should give the same results every time it measures, if it is used under the same conditions. This is considered the Reliability of a test. But human beings do not behave in exactly the same way on every occasion, even when the circumstances seem identical. The performances of students on any test can vary for a variety of reasons. The purpose of this research is to observe the reliability of two main tests. First I took a sample of test scores of the Placement Test (a written test) for “English for Business Communication” course (Test-1-A). This test was held in an examination hall in a fairly formal environment. After about one month, I took the same group of students and held the same test inside my classroom (Test-1-B). As the next step I held an oral test (presentation) again in a fairly formal environment (Test –2- A) for this particular group. Next, I held the same oral test inside my classroom for the same group of students. (Test-2-B) This paper attempts to focus on the reliability of these two tests by calculating the Reliability Coefficient - K-R 21. An analysis on how these reliability coefficients vary due to the sources of Error Variance, as a result of environment (e.g. location, space, ventilation) and also as a result of variance attributable to examinees (e.g. emotion, memory) will be discussed. At the conclusion of this investigation, we would be able to find out how these sources of Error Variance affect the reliability of the two tests. Moreover, we can minimize such Error Variance in test-administration to some extent.