Malay is a consistent alphabetic orthography with complex syllable structures. The focus of this research was to investigate word recognition performance in order to inform reading interventions for low-progress early readers. Forty-six Grade 1 students were sampled and 11 were identified as low-progress readers. The results indicated that both syllable awareness and phoneme blending were significant predictors of word recognition, suggesting that both syllable and phonemic grain-sizes are important in Malay word recognition. Item analysis revealed a hierarchical pattern of difficulty based on the syllable and the phonic structure of the words. Error analysis identified the sources of errors to be errors due to inefficient syllable segmentation, oversimplification of syllables, insufficient grapheme-phoneme knowledge and inefficient phonemic code assembly. Evidence also suggests that direct instruction in syllable segmentation, phonemic awareness and grapheme-phoneme correspondence is necessary for low-progress readers to acquire word recognition skills. Finally, a logical sequence to teach grapheme-phoneme decoding in Malay is suggested.
This study examined the phonological and reading performance in English of Malaysian children whose home language was Bahasa Malaysia (BM). A sample of 69 Malaysian Standard Two pupils (aged 7-8 years) was selected for the study. Since commencing school at the age of 6 years, the children had been learning to read in BM and had subsequently also been learning to read in English for some 12 months. The study was part of a larger scale research programme that fully recognized the limitations of tests that had not been developed and standardized in Malaysia. Nevertheless, as a first step to developing such tests, a comparison with existing norms for the Phonological Assessment Battery (PhAB) and the Wechsler Objective Reading Dimension (WORD) was undertaken in relation to information about the children's L1 and L2 language competencies. Results showed that the children's performance on PhAB was at least comparable to the UK norms while, not surprisingly, they fared less well on WORD. The results are discussed in terms of L1 and L2 transfer, whereby the transparency of written BM and the structured way in which reading is taught in BM facilitates performance on phonological tasks in English. This has implications for identifying children with phonologically based reading difficulties.
The purpose of the present study was to survey trainee teachers to find out if there was a relationship between phonological and phonics content knowledge, perceived proficiency in this knowledge, and feelings of self-efficacy as teachers. Participants were 51 undergraduate international teacher trainees from Malaysia studying in a 4-year university program to teach English as another language. They completed a phonological and phonics knowledge survey as well as a short questionnaire relating to self-efficacy for teaching. The survey results showed, similar to previous studies of the linguistic knowledge of teachers and teacher trainees, difficulties with phonological and phonics knowledge. Students who thought they were proficient in phonological and phonics knowledge were higher in phonological knowledge but not in phonics scores than were students who thought they were less proficient. The results for teaching self-efficacy showed that students with higher phonological knowledge had higher levels of external teaching self-efficacy in that they tended to disagree that factors outside their control made it difficult for some pupils to succeed. This suggests that higher levels of phonological knowledge gives prospective teachers more self-belief in their ability to help all their pupils.