The Department has the longest-standing international student exchange programme at the University of Colombo to date. Begun in 2008, the Department has sent 3-4 Special Degree students each year for a semester to Justus Liebig University (JLU), Giessen, Germany, while students from JLU, Giessen have come to the Department for a semester. This international collaboration gives students of the Department the opportunity to spend a semester overseas in Germany with full credit transfer so that they do not lose time in obtaining their degree, and the opportunity of experiencing student life in Europe. This exchange agreement is open to academic staff of the English Departments at both Universities as well. Currently the Department is in the process of developing a similar programme with the Department of English at Technical University, Dresden, Germany; and in 2016, the University of Colombo and the University of Malaysia, Sarawak (UNIMAS), Malaysia established a student exchange programme which enables students to participate in a short-term visit (of up to one semester) with the partner institution. These partnerships are also platforms for important international research collaborations (ex. the International Corpus of English (ICE-SL) project, which is a joint research project between the Departments of English at the University of Colombo and JLU, Giessen, focused on creating a corpus of written and spoken Sri Lankan English).