PERTANIKA JOURNAL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES

 

e-ISSN 2231-8534
ISSN 0128-7702

Home / Regular Issue / JSSH Vol. 21 (1) Mar. 2013 / JSSH-0324-2011

 

A Comparative Analysis of Word Structures in Malay and English Children's Stories

Lay Wah Lee, Hui Min Low and Abdul Rashid Mohamed

Pertanika Journal of Social Science and Humanities, Volume 21, Issue 1, March 2013

Keywords: Word analysis, cross-linguistics, English, Malay, reading intervention

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Malay is described as an alphabetic language with salient syllabic structures. In our attempt to develop a reading intervention program for early Malay struggling readers, word analysis of Malay children's stories was conducted. Additionally, in order to have a better understanding of Malay word structures, a cross-linguistic comparison with English was attempted. The results indicate significant cross-language differences for Malay and English words in terms of phoneme-grapheme correspondences, syllabic structure and types of inflectional morphemes. Malay is empirically shown to be a transparent language but with multiple syllabic structures and inflectional morphemes. The analysis also revealed that the most frequent occurring word structures in the Malay texts were bi-syllabic, with CV+CVC, CV+CV, V+CVC, and CVC+CVC word structures. This suggests that unlike English, the major set of word stimuli in early Malay reading intervention programs have to be bi-syllabic, which implies that additional syllabic decoding skills have to be taught in early reading intervention.

ISSN 0128-7702

e-ISSN 2231-8534

Article ID

JSSH-0324-2011

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