A Study on How the Lack of Understanding of Collocational Phrases Affect the Communication Skill of the Foreign Language Learners

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.