Abstract

The purpose of this research is to study the orthographical errors made by the native English second language (L2) learners of Sinhala. A blend of similarities and dissimilarities are visible between the orthography of English and Sinhala. Even though both languages are written horizontally in left to write direction, they do not share any scripts (letters) in common such as in English and French or English and Spanish. Sinhala has an alpha-syllabary written system, whereas English has an alphabetic written system. Due to the transfer effect (the influences from the first language (L1) on learning a second language (L2)) the native English students, who were learning communicative Sinhala, tended to mark errors in orthography in and outside the classroom. I have used the three most related theories for this study: The Transfer Theory, the Error Analysis and the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis. This paper discusses five major categories in which the second language students of beginner levelhave made errors while practicing their Sinhala orthography. The data was collected from 35 students over a period of 5 years and has been analyzed using qualitative methods. The qualitative data analysis revealed seven major categories of errors commonly done bythe second language students of beginner level while practicing their Sinhala orthography.

Keywords: Orthography, Sinhala, linguistic errors, second language