Towards an inclusive Sri Lankan English for ELT in Sri Lanka: identifying and validating phonological features of L1 Tamil speakers - Karuna Sivaji and Dinali Fernando [PowerPoint Presentation] (original) (raw)
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This paper reports on a study that investigates the views of teachers of English in the Northern Province on the unique phonological features of Jaffna English, a variety of Sri Lankan English (SLE) that has its own unique syntactic, morphological as well as phonological features . The main research area of this paper is World Englishes in the context of English language teaching (ELT), focusing on variation within SLE phonology. This paper will first discuss the current issues in ELT in Sri Lanka that underscore the study. It will then discuss the relevance of existing studies of SLE pronunciation in an ELT context. Next, it will describe the methodology of the present study. Following the presentation of its findings and discussion, the paper will conclude with a consideration of the study's significance, its limitations, and suggest directions for further research. While this study is limited to the segmental features of pronunciation, this paper uses the terms "pronunciation" and "phonology" interchangeably to mean the way in which sounds are produced in a language.
This book examines dialectal variation in Sri Lankan English (SLE) pronunciation through a taxonomic vantage where the architecture is scrutinized through deviations in lexical pronunciation. The status of Tamil English is examined and empirical validation is procured for its recognition as a separate entity in the taxonomy of SLE pronunciation. This validation is constructed through the analysis of the % rate of occurrence of 10 pronunciation characteristics unique in Tamil/Other Variety of Sri Lankan English (T/OVSLE) bilinguals. These features deviate from Standard Sri Lankan English (SSLE) as well as the pronunciation of Sinhala/Other Variety of Sri Lankan English (S/OVSLE) bilinguals. 486 participants selected through stratified random sampling measures provide data across an instrument of 50 word tokens. The word tokens represent 7 common areas of pronunciation and 10 unique to T/OVSLE bilinguals and were randomly shortlisted from literature on SLE and learner English pronunciation of bilinguals with Tamil as their first language. Analyzed data evidences a zero occurrence of the 10 features unique to T/OVSLE bilinguals in lexical elicitations of the S/OVSLE populations.
Postcolonial Englishes are a rich resource on cross linguistic dynamics in contact situations where English is the superstrate. Sinhala is a minority language of the world and is spoken by a population of 15,173,82016 in Sri Lanka. The language specific rankings of markedness constraints in the phonological grammar and conventions governing grapheme to phoneme conversion of Sinhala result in the dichotomy of transfer versus inhibition of the source language phonology. The Constraint Fluctuation Hypothesis recognizes that the reranking of constraints of a donor language is not a homogeneous process. Thus within the typology of Sri Lankan Englishes the pronunciation of the Standard variety has gained endonormative stabilization and codification while Other Varieties of SLE flout a multitude of norms set down by the standard. English l...
Postcolonial Englishes are a rich source on cross linguistic dynamics in contact situations where English is the superstrate. Sinhala is a minority language of the world and is spoken by a population of 15,173,820 in Sri Lanka. The language specific rankings of markedness constraints in the phonological grammar and conventions governing grapheme to phoneme conversion rules of Sinhala result in the dichotomy of transfer versus inhibition of the source language phonology. The Constraint Fluctuation Hypothesis recognizes that the reranking of constraints of a donor language is not a homogeneous process. Thus within the typology of Sri Lankan Englishes the pronunciation of the Standard variety has gained endonormative stabilization and codification while Other varieties flout a multitude of norms set down by the standard. English loanword assimilation paradigms which add to the corpus of the thadbhawa wordstock of Sinhala and current practices in loanword usage in Sinhala print media scaffold further evidence that transfer of the assimilated phonological contours too is a causal factor. The theoretical basis of this book recruits Markedness and Expense of Effort during analysis.
This paper argues that the transference of existing, selected phonological practices of Sinhala is one of the causal factors for generating three phonemic features in the pronunciation of the users of learner dialects of Sri Lankan English. Through analysis of evidence drawn from English loanword adaptation paradigms in current Sinhala print media the paper argues that the three selected deviations from Standard Sri Lankan English in learner phonological practices are influenced by the non volitional and non elective transfer of existing phonological practices in Sinhala.
Patterns of phonological errors in the phonemic clusters in Sri Lankan English
2015
This study investigates whether problems in pronunciation related to consonant clusters of thelanguage learners which have been overlooked over the years as random errors are indeed random. Specifically, this research questions if the problems in pronunciation related to consonant clusters in Sri Lankan English are results of the interference of the learners' first language, Sinhala. Furthermore, it identifies about seven patterns of the errors and compares them with similar errors among other speakers from different language backgrounds who also learn English as a second language. This study aims to address the issues arising on account of teachers in secondary education who generally ignore such challenges and the gatekeepers of Sri Lankan English whose identification of speakers with such pronunciation errors as speakers of 'not pot English', which can create social barriers. Moreover, the features of the cluster deviation which can also be found among pronunciation problems of other New Englishes suggest that it is justifiable to view it as a learner problem common to many second language speakers. The research is primarily based on phonological data gathered from the interviews of fifty (50) adult participants in 2013 and 2014.
This study aims at studying whether the concept of regional dialectical variations had the effect on English Language users in Sri Lanka and to which extent they differ from region to region when speaking and writing in English as a second language. In order to identify this phenomenon, 125(hundred and twenty five) students ( five groups) of Sri Lanka Advanced Technological Education were randomly chosen from six regions and surveyed with twenty five structured questionnaire and an interview. Questionnaires tested formal written expressions while the interview tested formal oral expressions. Thereby the researcher examined to which extent the participants deviated from standard Sri Lankan dialect. The researcher conducted a methodical analysis of the collected data linguistically. It enabled the researcher to identify how and why each group differs from the other dialectically. They are logically treated after thorough analysis under particular linguistic categories. The combinations of the findings of the study and the knowledge gained in the process of study are used to draw conclusions of the factors that contributed to those dialectical variations. Finally the researcher has made some suggestions to go for Identical Sri Lankan Dialect rather than trying to promote regional dialectical variations since the researcher could not elucidate substantial variations among the participants of the study Index Terms-Sri Lankan Dialect, second language, dialectical variation, first language, language interference
Acoustic Characteristics of Three Vowels of Standard Sri Lankan English
The phonology of Standard Sri Lankan English (SSLE) reflects a strong influence from the vernaculars of Sri Lanka: Sinhala and Tamil. This results in deviations from the donor colonial Standard British English pronunciation. This study provides measurements of formant frequencies in synchronically recorded sound data for six selected vowels, short and long monophthongs of SSLE.Evidence is compiled through formant readings of acoustic documentation from elicitations of ten female bilingual subjects.Of the ten bilingual subjects five have Sinhala and the rest Tamil as their first language while SSLE is their second language. Formant contoursare compared to parallel data in literature. Discriminant analysis showed that these SSLE vowels differ in terms of average frequencies of formants from Standard Southern British Englishand American English equivalent