LASNI JAYASOORIYA (KYUSHU UNIVERSITY, JAPAN)

BILINGUAL EDUCATION AND IDENTITY POLITICS IN POST-WAR SRI LANKA : LANGUAGE PLANNING AND LANGUAGE POLICY

Sri Lanka is a conflict-ridden multicultural and multilingual society, where language disputes have contributed to social tension. English, which is its colonial linguistic inheritance, is currently designated as a link language, while the main local languages, namely Sinhala and Tamil, are recognized as the national and official languages. Bilingual education, introduced in 2002 to secondary grades in Sri Lanka, was one of the most significant language policy changes of recent years. The current research, employing a qualitative approach and drawing on both primary and secondary data, investigates the implications of bilingual education for the construction of identity among school students in Sri Lanka, illuminating how various stakeholders have understood and responded to related policies. The research also examines the implementation of the policy and the opinions of stakeholders, comparing these to the policy's declared objectives. The findings show how efforts to promote bilingual education have contributed to an expansion of the disparity between rural and urban school communities, while also creating new power dynamics at the classroom level, with implications for the construction of students’ identities. This article thus challenges the romanticization of bilingual education as an attempt to democratize English language education and achieve post-conflict reconciliation between the two major ethnic communities in Sri Lanka.

Lasni is a PhD candidate in Comparative education at Department of Education, Kyushu University, Japan. Her research interests focus on school curricula, language policies, identity politics, and reconciliation in post-war Sri Lanka. She was a former ESL teacher.