Human trafficking –  defined as organ and sex trafficking, and slavery materialized through numerous stratagems – is a growing problem worldwide. There has been a rising interest in the topic of human trafficking, and its mounting complexity and challenge. However, research has scarcely included literary representations of human trafficking achieved via e-surveillance processes: in this respect, Asian plays have received no sufficient critical attention. This article aims to redress this dearth by investigating the processes of human trafficking as depicted in the Indian playwright Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest, which premiered in 1999 in Greece. The play, a literary testimony to the complexity and subtlety of human trafficking processes, features storylines about human trafficking exercised through the forms of coercion, abduction, sexual seduction, fraud, deception, and abuse of power. Therefore, Harvest is closely read through Fanon’s, Foucault’s, and Bauman and Lyon’s perspectives of surveillance in this article. Reading the play provides a point of discussion of the third world’s vulnerability and its resistance to the first world’s human trafficking. It sheds much light on diverse human harvesting means such as organ harvesting and repopulation, and miscegenation, utilized through e-surveillance. The article offers complex insights into human trafficking victims of surveillance – both their vulnerability and the attempts of their agency.

Characterized by specific and rigid boundaries of institutional practices and expectations in the academy, student writing is a synergistic literacy practice where students are required to construct generically diverse texts by yoking concepts with appropriate linguistic resources. This empirical study involving 196 first-year ESL students at a university in Sri Lanka explores why conceptual incongruities occur in argumentative essays constructed by them, and how they defend their arguments. We analyzed all their timed essays and noticed that 72 out of them contained conceptual incongruities. By “conceptual incongruities, we refer to instances where students” conceptualization process is not aligned or coherent with the essay topic. For our analysis of student texts, we have introduced two social cognitive perspectives: untutored competencies and tutored competencies. The former includes inherited, social, and ideological identities emerging from societal epistemologies whereas disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity constitute the latter. This empirical research demonstrates how students’ conceptualization process is mediated by a labyrinthine repertoire of knowledge premised in students’ untutored competencies and tutored competencies, signaling deviations from their essay topic.

The discussion on the dynamic assessment (DA) - a combination of assessment and instruction - and regulatory scales from implicit to explicit corrective feedback (CF) is relatively new in the CALL context. Applying the notions of Sociocultural Theory, Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) and Mediation, the present study examines how a DA-based regulatory scale from implicit to explicit CF could be designed to promote language learning in the text chat environment. This was done in collaboration with teachers. Four English-as-a-second-language (ESL) teachers and eight ESL students participated in the study. Using the methodology of design-based research (DBR), the study was conducted mainly in three stages: exploratory stage, first intervention, and second intervention. This study drew on various data. Naturally occurring interaction data such as teachers’ oral conversation transcripts and text chat transcripts were analysed using conversation analysis, while the teachers’ interviews were analysed using thematic analysis. Thus, employing DBR, the present study introduces a three-step regulatory scale that could promote learning in the text chat environment. The findings suggest that the three-step regulatory scale could be used by teachers to identify the learner’s potential and assist them in partial or complete self-regulation. The study will introduce a DA-based regulatory scale to promote language learning in the text chat environment and contribute to the knowledge of DA, ZPD and mediation in the CALL context.

Code-switching–extrasentential shifts transferring the focus from one language to another–is undoubtedly a characteristic of cross-cultural encounter: it is generally assumed in the literature that bilinguals mix their two languages to considerable degrees. Code-switching in its oral production has largely been researched, devoting attention to its grammatical patterns, structure and meaning, and the like. Nevertheless, very little research focuses on code-switching in writing, particularly on Sinhala-English shifts in written e-communication methods. The overall intent of this study was to examine the use of code-switching in emails employed by Sinhala and English bilinguals. The fourfold question aimed (i) to explore the frequency of code-switching in emails among bilinguals of English and Sinhala languages,(ii) to investigate the possible relation between code-switching and email recipients,(iii) to determine the possible correlation between code-switching and the subject matter in emails, and (iv) to explore the reasons and functions for code-switching in such emails. A questionnaire, a semi-structured interview, and a collection of emails were employed as research instruments in this exploratory study. Over 100 Sinhala-English bilinguals contributed to the questionnaire: while 20 of their emails were analyzed to triangulate the data, and 5 participants were interviewed to ascertain further the data collected. Data analysis was performed both on a statistical test called a Chi-squire test and an evaluation of the content of emails. Evidently, code-switching is highly frequent, and preferred to a single language, in informal emails. It entails diverse socio …

Defined as ‘networks of learning relationships among students and significant others’, peer assisted learning takes a bewildering array of forms in higher education. A useful way to conceptualise these is to draw from ideas of communities of practice and communicative rationality, with the degree of student autonomy a third key element. We illustrate this approach with a study of Kuppi, an example of peer assisted learning initiated and organised entirely by students. We interviewed undergraduate participants from six state universities in Sri Lanka and found strong support for this model of peer assisted learning from student learners and student tutors. These classes are characterised by informality and discussion, flexibility in timing and location and a focus on assessments. Students determine the content and who teaches, whilst tutors give their time without payment, out of fraternity and to improve their own learning and skills. The theory of communicative rationality helped explain much of the attraction of this form of peer assisted learning. There was evidence for a strong community of practice; however apart from peer tutors aspiring to become academics, this involved mostly reinforcement of student identity rather than transformation into emerging roles. The high levels of engagement and student autonomy shown by Kuppi challenge suggestions that peer assisted learning must be organised by tutors if it is to be effective.

This article explores the ways in which Anglophone dramas in postcolonial South Africa became a tool of political and protest theater. It examines the emergence of Anglophone theater, explores its development into political praxis and discusses the performance or non-performance contexts, as well as their specific socio-political milieux, with reference to the select plays from South Africa. These plays are compelling as they characterize specific tensions internal to South Africa, while alluding to colonial legacies and global coercion. Historicization is a crucial phase in this study and the key part of the methodology that establishes their political and aesthetic significance, both at the time of performance and after. The central argument of the article is that Anglophone theater of South Africa is subjected to–and bound by–socio-political and cultural dynamics of the country; the emergence of political and protest theater is often caused by subtle or overt subterfuges of biopolitics exercised internally within this postcolonial territory.

English Medium Instruction (EMI) is a growing educational praxis in the world. Sri Lanka also practises EMI in primary, secondary and university education contexts. Nevertheless, EMI is not adequately researched: the existing scholarship alludes to the significance of its context-dependency (eg, Snchez-Prez, Maria del Mar 2020). Moreover, there is a lacuna of scholarly knowledge of how EMI works in Sri Lankan educational contexts. Hence, this exploratory study examined lecturers’ practices of, and insights into, EMI within the context of Sri Lankan higher education. The data were drawn from in-depth qualitative interviews with ten lecturers who teach Social Sciences through EMI at three state universities in the country. Interviewees–encompassing males and females and belonging to varying age groups–have a range of EMI teaching experience and different professional and educational qualifications. Qualitative thematic analysis was utilised to uncover themes related to EMI in the data. Findings disclose a few issues and problems associated with EMI. They underscore the belief that EMI enhances L2 (Second Language) proficiency, thus creating a space for job opportunities for undergraduates, and higher education and professional development for both lecturers and students. Nevertheless, EMI is problematic mainly due to (i) low L2 proficiency in both lecturers and students,(ii) lecturers’ inconsistent praxis in assessing and teaching students,(iii) the shortage of training programmes on EMI, and (iv) arbitrary administration issues including the recruitment of EMI lecturers. The paper provides insights into EMI implementation in English as L2 …

Corrective feedback (CF) has been proven to be effective in Second Language Acquisition (SLA). With the increased usage of technology in the field of education, learning a second or foreign language in a computer mediated environment is widely discussed in current literature, thus paving the way for research on computer mediated corrective feedback (CMCF). As such, CMCF, especially through tools such as text chat, has gained increasing attention from researchers. Nevertheless, the scholarly focus has often been confined to certain aspects such as peer CF or CF given by native speakers (NS) in telecollaboration projects. As teachers could provide step by step scaffolding to make learners notice their errors and correct them, teachers’ CF in text chat environment could be more useful. However, text chat has rarely been discussed as a mediating tool to provide teachers’ CF. Addressing this potential gap in research, the present study aims to explore the perspectives of university teachers and students on the potential of using text chat for teachers’ CF, while discussing the challenges they would encounter in the process. Applying the sociocultural theoretical framework, the study discusses text chat as a mediating tool and the role teachers could play in assisting learners in the zone of proximal development. The data were collected from five Sri Lankan university teachers and two groups of university students (five in each group) through individual and group interviews, respectively. An Affinity Diagram was employed to analyse the data thematically. The study suggests that teachers’ CF through text chat could play a significant role in a context …

This book brings together emerging insights from across the humanities and social sciences to highlight how postcolonial studies are being transformed by increasingly influential and radical approaches to nature, matter, subjectivity, human agency, and politics. These include decolonial studies, political ontology, political ecology, indigeneity, and posthumanisms. The book examines how postcolonial perspectives demand of posthumanisms and their often ontological discourses that they reflexively situate their own challenges within the many long histories of decolonised practice. Just as postcolonial research needs to critically engage with radical transitions suggested by the ontological turn and its related posthumanist developments, so too do posthumanisms need to decolonise their conceptual and analytic lenses. The chapters' interdisciplinary analyses are developed through global, critical, and empirical cases that include: city spaces and urbanisms in the Global North and South; food politics and colonial land use; cultural and cosmic representation in film, theatre, and poetry; nation building; the Anthropocene; materiality; the void; pluriversality; and, indigenous world views. Theoretically and conceptually rich, the book proposes new trajectories through which postcolonial and posthuman scholarships can learn from one another and so critically advance.