Despite textual and other historical evidence pertaining to 'learning' and 'teaching' in ancient Lanka is sparse scholars have focused their attention on such notions. However, there is rich evidence for 'learning' and 'teaching' in ancient Lanka's folktales which treat these concepts as 'lived experiences' of protagonists occupying imaginary worlds. Yet, there has been minimal scholarly attention paid to folktales. This paper focuses on those folktales with the objective of locating what such storytelling tells us about the way common folks perceived education. Using a folkloristic standpoint which views folk speech acts as being carriers of not only cultural embellishments but cultural predispositions, this study attempts to locate what the notions of 'learning' and 'teaching' present in stories told by southern Lankans tell us about their deepseated attitudes to/understandings of education. The study uses Henry Parker's Ceylonese folktales as its sample and attempts to locate the enabling conditions that uphold the ideas of 'learning' and 'teaching' to achieve its objectives. 57This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License (CC-BY-SA). This license permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium; provided it is licensed under the same terms and the original work is properly cited.

Teaching literature is a complex and challenging task, particularly because of the multiple interpretive possibilities of literary texts. It is even more so when teaching English poetry to learners for whom English is a second language. Further, Literature has been traditionally been a subject that needs the presence of a teacher to assist students in their quest to read for deeper understanding and interpretation of texts. This study investigated second-year undergraduates' perceptions on learning T.S. Eliot's epic poem The Waste Land -a notedly difficult text to access, owing to its length as well as the need for compulsory background reading on history, mythology, Eastern and Western philosophy and the Classics -via both an online intervention and an in-person Day School, using a qualitative research design and in-depth semi-structured interviews. The study found that the BA in English and English

Global research into folkloric speech acts, like folktales, folksongs and folk drama, have revealed a rich body of concealed cultural conventions and concepts, prompting the folklorist Alan Dundes to identify such events as 'autobiographical ethnography,' or the way in which a group of people would portray themselves. The present study focuses on potential cultural conjecture that could be located in a body of regional folktales found among a group of people engaged in a specific vocation, gem mining. These folktales are published as Sabaragamuwe Menik Kathandara saha Sinharaje Withthi (Gem-related Tales from Sabaragamuwa and the Happenings of the Sinharaja Forest) by their collector Tharindu Sudharshana Abeysinghe. This study intends to locate the folkloric postulate of 'folk ideas' embedded in the tales with the objective of * This is a direct translation of the quote "dena deviyo denekota backhoe atha purola denava kivvalu" found in Tale No. 14 of Sabaragamuwe Menik Kathandara saha Sinharaje Withthi by Tharindu S. Abeysinghe (2018).

Seeming absence of focused scholarly intervention has not deterred folklorists from considering, orally transmitted imaginative speech acts-such as folktales-as a specific community's "autobiographical ethnography" (Dundes, 2007) or their "own descriptions of themselves" (Dundes, 2007). In Sri Lanka, (Sinhala) folktales are an essential feature in school texts books, children's newspapers, mass media, and Sinhala folktale collections are frequently released for public consumption with some prominent bookshops offering exclusive shelf space for this genre. A collection of Sri Lankan folktales attributed to a specific geography and an ethnic community is the focus of this study. The collection is titled Digamadulle Muslim Janakatha and its collector/compiler is Gunasekera Gunasoma, a popular folktale collector in Sri Lanka, and a fiction writer. Gunasoma offers 16 folktales collected from Digamadulle in this book and his endeavor could possibly be the first such collection of folktales attributed to the Muslim ethnic community living in Digamadulle, or for that matter anywhere else in Sri Lanka. The present study attempts to extract the cultural postulates featured in these tales, theoretically identified as 'folk ideas' and 'worldview' by folklorists. Using definitions of the folklorist Allan Dundes, this study undertakes a close reading of the folktale sample under consideration to comprehend how the Muslim story tellers/creators/listeners of Digamadulle perceived and imagined the 'world' and its nature. Scholar Samarsinghe's (2014) view that folktales facilitate 'social cohesion' would also play into the motivations of this study, whose primary objective is cultural comprehension.

King Ravana has already attained a cult status in modern Sri Lanka owing to a resurgence of texts about the legendary king that suddenly flooded the bookshops as well as the mass media. Yet, unseen by this phenomenon, a folktale collection focusing on Ravana was released for public consumption by Gunasekera Gunasoma under the titled Sabaragamuwa Ravana Jana Katha (Ravana Folktales of the Sabaragamuwa Region). This study undertakes a re-reading of these folktales using the folkloric postulate of 'folk ideas' in order to locate the modes of construction of the personality of 'King Ravana' and the insights such constructions might offer into the material conditions of the story creators/tellers/listeners. Folktales tend to carry cultural assumptions, as well as cultural prejudices, of common folks through the implicitly embedded 'folk ideas' in their narratives and this study intends to locate such 'silent' articulations and analyse them to