MY STATEMENT OF RESEARCH INTERESTS

Jeyaseelan Gnanaseelan

MY STATEMENT OF RESEARCH INTERESTS

(written in the year of 2000 when I was 30 years old and a college lecturer)

Since I am a person of academic interests covering the areas such as TESL, English Literature, Applied Linguistics (specifically Second Language Acquisition and Learning, Contrastive and Comparative Linguistic Studies, Error Analysis, and Discourse Analysis), and Educational Psychology, I prefer doing academic researches related to these types of specifications.

The reason behind my choice of the areas of interests mentioned above is simple and logical. I am an Asian but, now, I face a situation, yes, a situation of the survival of the fittest in the competitive academic world. In this century of globalization and internationalization, I must serve the academic world and obtain service from it as well. To achieve this educational goal for the people living in Asia, the foremost requirement is a global medium, that is, The English language; whether we like it or not, (definitely I like it), it is taken for granted.

This drives me to concentrate on the areas of those academic specializations to find solutions for the problems in using English as a medium of instruction for academic purposes (EAP) of the students of my province, the North East of Sri Lanka and Sri Lanka as a whole primarily. As I have mentioned in my application, I did a dissertation on this topic related to the students of the diploma in accountancy and finance (94/95) of the Northern Province Affiliated University College, Vavuniya. Nowadays, the people of my region begin to revive their interest in the use of English after having experienced so many traumatic racial discriminations since they are a minority. During the immediate post-colonial period, English dominated their life style but later due to the revival of nationalistic tendencies, the use of English in many important areas began to diminish gradually. Now they realize the situation in a clear sense. (Please see the academic research section of my resume).

Bilingualism in Srilankan academic institutions is my next extended academic area of research interest. In Asia, most of the countries are multicultural and multilingual. As a result, many psychological, social, political and economic problems are encompassing the region; its scientific and technological advancement is affected. So I want to study the ways and means to establish English as a link language in addition to their mother tongue they speak. This concern leads me to focus on the areas such as Second Language Acquisition and Learning (the SLA and SLL).

The concentration on the use of English medium and the SLA and SLL further expanded my scope of the academic interests which demanded my involvement in finding the similarities and dissimilarities between L1 and L2 especially Tamil and English in contrastive and comparative linguistic studies of applied linguistics. Here I am interested specifically in analyzing them at the syntactic and discourse levels. I made a minor research-oriented assignment on the analysis of a Tamil child speech and language under psycholinguistics in my MA in Linguistics program at Keleniya University, Sri Lanka.

Error analysis is an area, which makes me more interested in finding generalizations, overgeneralizations, and systems behind the errors made by our Tamil students when they use English. I hope my studies of their errors will further enhance the understanding of the structure of the English language and help the students improve in using the medium properly. Here one thing I must quote about my mother tongue Tamil. It is spoken by more than 80 million people all over the world. mainly in Tamil Nadu, India, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Malaysia, Canada etc,. In Canada itself, more than three hundred thousand Tamils live.

Educational psychology and philosophy of language are my additional areas to be interested in, especially related to the TESL programs, literature teaching and linguistic programs.

Finally I would like to say that my statement of research interests are more or less related to the TESL, EAP, SLA, SLL, Literature in English and Applied linguistics.I promise that I am eager to assist my superior or researcher with commitment in these academic areas.