Comparing and Contrasting Kinship Terms of Sinhala, Tamil, and Chinese for Second and Foreign Language Teaching in Sri Lanka

Abstract

This study is projected to discuss prominent issues in teaching kinship terms of Sinhala, Tamil, and Chinese in second and foreign language teaching in Sri Lanka. This study involves with communicative functional approach methodology. Detail descriptive analysis is done on the usage of the kinship terms in different cultural backgrounds, based on the information collected from different languages. The concepts of language, culture, kinship term will be defined, respectively. The relationship between language and culture will also be pointed out. Moreover, factors such as grammatical importance that have an impact on the success of teaching culture-oriented kinship terms to second and foreign language students will be examined. Detail analysis was done to understand the functions of the kinship terms in different languages. From the communicative approach, it is investigated how kinship terms are used in various social environments and how could teach them in second language teaching. The work and analysis undertaken in this paper significantly contributes to identify the language patterns via the kin relationship between the society and the language.