Resources

Welcome addressDownload
Vote of thanksDownload

The corpus of Sri Lankan Special Occasion Speeches was compiled by Erandi Kithulgoda as part of her research conducted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for a Master of Arts in Teaching English as a Second Language at Postgraduate Institute of English, Open University of Sri Lanka.

This small, specialised corpus consists of 40 formal to semi-formal authentic Welcome Address (WA) and Vote of Thanks (VT) speeches delivered in a professional setting by Sri Lankan speakers between 2005 to 2016. The data collection was carried out in 2016-2017. The WA sub corpus of 20 texts contains 13,805 words while the VT sub corpus is 9562 words.

Related Article:

Kithulgoda, E. & Mendis, D. (2020). From analysis to pedagogy: Developing ESP materials for the Welcome Address in Sri Lanka. English for Specific Purposes, 60, 140–158. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2020.05.003

Sri Lankan English Newspaper corpus – 2015 is a web- derived newspaper corpus of 2-million words compiled by Hediwaththege Chathuri Keshala in 2015. The corpus was initially compiled by Keshala for personal use in a corpus based research project that she conducted as a part of her thesis for a Master of Arts in English Studies, Department of English, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka.

The Sri Lankan English Newspaper corpus – 2015 includes texts extracted from two Sri Lankan newspapers, Daily News and Daily Mirror published in 2015. 1 million words from each newspaper is included in this corpus totalling 3 million words.

 If you are interested in using this corpus for research or as a teaching resource, please download by clicking on the title.

This corpus contains approximately 2250 articles from five registers of the newspaper genre published between 2004 to 2006. The five registers are lead stories (top news stories), editorials, features, letters to the editor, and sports.

Tutorial on using AntConc by Lawrence Anthony here.

  • From the classroom – Using Padlets to build and share knowledge on World English(es)

The Department of English offers ENG 2232- English Across the World as a diverse and timely course unit that explores the interesting transformations happening around the use of English on a global scale. 

As Padlet has become a favorite platform and digital tool for collaborative digital learning, the students worked on developing padlets to analyze different varieties of Englishes around the world.

The final result of this crowd-sourced activity is a digitized set of data that is interactive and proof of how language learning evolves in the digital age.

ENG 3158- Sri Lankan English Studies, is a Third-Year Honors Degree course unit offered by the Department of English. In 2022, the students explored the poetry of Richard de Soyza, Jirasinghe, and Arasanayagam,  Vivimarie VanderPoorten, Anne Ranasinghe, Patrick Fernando, and Malinda Seneviratne. The students explored the poems in terms of;

  • Incorporation of the Sri Lankan socio-political contexts (Note: ‘socio’ is inclusive of culture)
  • Linguistic creation of identity
  • Relatability

The findings and the analyses of the poems and poets were recorded padlets. This digital, online educational tool allowed the students to collaborate as groups, and also enhanced their data presentations by adding more creative digital visuals to their work. Given below are the links to the padlets the students created.

https://padlet.com/nathaliebogedain/94y3ksoq6x4rzy5q

https://padlet.com/esithmi/pldizmmbg9e9jb36

https://padlet.com/thanuricharithma99/zce8xq0qr2lre41v

https://padlet.com/aparnagamage7/oxch1z9j6ks10zf3

https://padlet.com/vibhathj/xeae2tyue11kavf0

This lab session was designed as a pedagogical task to supplement the course unit, ENG 2219/ ENG 2223: The Novel in the 18th and 19th Centuries. The objective of this session was to familiarise the students with the interconnectedness of space, mobility and bodies in Thomas Hardy’s novel Jude the Obscure. The lab session permitted the students to reimagine these aspects of the novel in relation to cartography and produce maps that traced these concerns using a digital mapmaking platform.