Abstract

Despite the dramatic growth in demand for Chinese language in Sri Lanka, fewer efforts have been taken for catering the specific necessities of Sri Lankan CFL learners towards an optimal student friendly learning environment. The hegemonic and ideological approaches of global textbooks have least addressed the socio-linguistic attributes of Sri Lankan learners. The present study examines the shortcomings of global CFL textbooks used by Sri Lankan learners from a student perspective and develops a rudimentary conceptual framework with reference to existing literature. The key informants of the study were (n=35) Chinese language students of Sri Lanka who constitute for a non-probabilistic convenience sample. It was inferred from the analysis that there is a critical requirement of incorporating local languages, their specific vocabulary and local context into CFL textbooks in Sri Lanka. It was further concluded that textbooks best be optimized for supporting translanguaging or partial immersion rather than total immersion or monolingual instructional approaches that would accommodate the socio-linguistic, socio-cultural and meta-cognitive spaces of the learners.

Keywords: Multilingualism, Nativizing, Sri Lanka, Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language in Sri Lanka, Textbooks