Abstract:
For the past few decades, the number of Japanese language learners in Sri Lanka and
the number of Sinhala language learners in Japan have been increased. In that
context, researches on developing teaching methodologies for Japanese and Sinhala
as foreign languages have become more prominent. It is now universally
acknowledged that the foreign language teaching requires much attention over the
students’ communication skills other than the grammatical knowledge. Therefore,
this research mainly focuses on the usage of collocational phrases and its cultural
background in both Japanese and Sinhala. It is observed that the current Japanese
language teachers do not have the slightest understanding of the collocations in
Japanese language and they are not included even in the text books. Vice-versa, the
Japanese people learning Sinhala as a foreign language do not have the
understanding of the Sinhala collocations. Moreover, they face difficulties occurred
by the diaglossia in Sinhala, as diaglossia cannot be found in Japanese. This research
aims to prove how the lack of understanding on collocational phrases and their
cultural contexts, can negatively influence over the communication skill of the
language learners. In order to prove these hypotheses, questionnaires from 50
students and 40 students from University of Kelaniya and the University of
Sabaragamuwa respectively, 40 Japanese Language teachers from national schools,
interviews with 15 Japanese nationals working as JICA volunteers in Sri Lanka, 03
Sinhala Language teachers who teach Sinhala to Japanese people, 05 Japanese
translators and one dubbing director and some translated scripts of Japanese films
done by the researcher were used as case study. It was proved that the current
teaching methods have not allowed the students to understand the usage of
collocations in different cultural contexts so far. There is a dearth of dictionaries
which explains the collocations of Japanese and Sinhala Verbs. Sri Lankan JFL
Students and Sinhala-learning Japanese people face difficulties in expressing
themselves because they are always influenced by the sentence patterns of their
mother language, as they lack the understanding of the collocational phrases of the
target language. Thus, this impacts on the learners’ career prospects too.
