Jobs, Businesses, and Professions(First published in The Island/17 December 2010)“The highest reward for a person’s toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it.” - John Ruskin (1819-1900), English writer, art critic and social reformerThe three words job, business, and profession all relate to work done in expectation of payment or income, but mean different ...
The Ten Year Master Plan for a Trilingual Sri Lanka(Previously published in The Island/3rd December 2010)The 10 year National Master Plan for a Trilingual Sri Lanka (2011-2020) to be launched as a presidential initiative is going to be a massive implementation-oriented language management exercise, probably the most ambitious ever of its kind. A survey carried out by an independent research ...
Technology-mediated Language Teaching(First published in The Island/Friday 26th November 2010)Any teaching-learning situation involves a dynamic interrelationship between three components: the learner, the subject, and the teacher. The role of the teacher in this relationship is to initiate and maintain effective learner engagement with the subject. Pedagogy is about how this can be done efficiently. A handy tool that modern teachers ...
Teaching Language through Literature(First published in The Island/Friday 12th November, 2010)Children love to play with language. Toddlers sometimes coin their own non-sense musical phrases and enjoy singing them repeatedly. Older children play games in which singing is an essential accompaniment to physical movements. They like to listen to stories and relate ones which they already know or which they make ...
Teachers as Nation-builders(First published in The Island/22nd Friday, October 2010)A nation comprises the people of a country, not its land, buildings, or natural features, though these may help identify a particular nation as its possessions. Nation building, therefore, means the development of the human factor along with the other resources of the country so that its people are able to ...
Letting the Genie out of the Bottle (First published in The Island/1st October 2010)Cynics might see some contradiction in the rehabilitation of English as a medium of general education, with prospects of eventually making it the universal medium of teaching in the future, in a country where sixty years of teaching it as a second language must be considered a ...
A Way out of Trouble with Grammar(First published in The Island/24th September 2010)Probably, it isn’t much of a problem to use classical grammatical labels to identify words in English sentences. But it’s a different matter when, even today, some grammarians claim, as those of the eighteenth century did, that the English sentence structure should faithfully follow the Classical Latin sentence ...
Cultivation of Critical Thinking(First published in The Island/20th August 2010) Education is good just so far as it produces well-developed critical faculty . . . A teacher of any subject, who insists on accuracy and a rational control of all processes and methods, and who holds everything open to unlimited verification and revision, is cultivating that method as a habit ...
Looking forward to a Future of Prosperity(Previously published in The Island/13th August 2010)Beginning with the 1948 Independence we have had five watersheds that determined in turn the orientation of the Sri Lankan national polity over the past sixty-two years, the other four being 1956 (political empowerment of the common people), 1972 (the reinforcement of political independence through a republican constitution), ...
Where there’s oil – There’s turmoil(First published in The Island/30th July 2010)We are almost certainly on the threshold of a new era of economic development and international diplomacy ushered in by the imminent discovery of oil. Drilling is due to start in the Mannar Basin next January. This opens before us exciting prospects of economic prosperity as well as daunting ...
Parents can help children to learn English(First published in The Island/Friday 6th August 2010)Living in a welfare state we enjoy, among other things, free healthcare and free education. However, there is much that we as citizens are obliged to do to complement or supplement these services. Unless we thus collaborate with the state the whole community will be negatively affected. ...
Why the Maligawa Road Should Not Be Reopened(First published in The Island/23rd July 2010 with some parts deleted to shorten the article)The current proposal to reopen the road stretch adjacent to the Sri Dalada Maligawa in Kandy is being met with a show of approval as well as opposition, though on the whole the response on the part of the ...
What Is Happiness?(First published in The Island on Friday 16th July 2010)Happiness is commonly defined as a state of mind marked by such pleasant feelings as satisfaction, contentment, freedom from anxiety, mental tranquillity, and other similar positive moods. The Chambers Thesaurus (Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd., 2004) lists twenty-four synonyms for the word “happiness” including joy, gladness, cheerfulness, contentment, pleasure, delight, ...
Buddhism is introduced to the little island kingdom(First published in the Sunday Times/ 15th June 2003)The colonization of the island by a North Indian tribe and the subsequent introduction of Buddhism can be described as the two most significant events in the early history of Sri Lanka. The Buddhist monks who committed them to recorded history, about seven hundred years ...
Korean Jobs for Our English Teachers: A Way to Eat the Cake and Have It Too(This first appeared in the Midweek Review of the Island on Wednesday 9th June, 2010)“Is the new Minister of Education getting off on the wrong foot?” I wondered when I first heard the news a few days ago that he had agreed to send some ...
Literacy or Transliteracy?(This first appeared in The Island on Wednesday 3rd March 2010)Literacy in the new media age involves much more than what its conventional definition says. Traditionally it is defined as the ability to read and write. A person is said to be literate if they can read and write in their first language at a basic level. Here ...