e-ISSN 2231-8534
ISSN 0128-7702
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
Published on:
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
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