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Abstract
This paper is based on an action research taking 60% of the student populace of the Trincomalee Campus of the Eastern University, Sri Lanka as its universe in order to understand the poor performance of the learners when it comes to English. A structured questionnaire through stratified random sampling was administered and the results were cumulated and analyzed through percentage analysis. This paper analyzes the various strategies used by the students of Trincomalee Campus, who mostly belong to the underprivileged strata of the Sri Lankan society where many are first generation learners with regard to Higher Education. Majority have done their schooling through their L1 along with their underprivileged status, makes this study unique since the Trincomalee Campus of the Eastern University, Sri Lanka is different from other HEIs in Sri Lanka due to the greater mixture and proximity of various ethnic and religious groups and thus the learning patterns opted by these students to achieve competence in L2 (English) is a unique mixture prompting validity with a potential for further development in Second Language Acquisition policy decisions.