Pre-service special educators' Malay word structure knowledge was assessed through their analysis of words. A total of 69 participants analysed a vocabulary list based on a set of criteria formulated from the Malay language word structure. Results indicated that they were able to count syllables and phonemes, and identify types of…

The review of existing literature suggests that few researchers have adopted cross-language comparisons to explore how cultural background affects the assessment of reading comprehension of students. In this present study, the researchers independently reviewed and rated all the items of two reading comprehension tests translated from Malay into…

The Educational Decree of 1863 was an effort by Spain to reform the Philippine colonial education system. The Decree established a complete system of education in the archipelago--it required two elementary schools in each municipality (one for girls and one for boys), standardized the curriculum, and established normal schools, thus making…

The study examines the sustainability status of Sarawak indigenous languages through a survey on adolescents' language use using the Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (EGIDS). The specific aspects examined were: the presence of ethnic languages in relation to other languages in selected domains of language use; the…

This article is based on a research investigating the communication in primary mathematics classrooms. One of the research's objectives was to determine what languages were used in the primary mathematics classrooms, and to what extent, do teachers and students resort to code-switching in teaching and learning mathematics. A total of 16 classroom…

The Malay literary materials and resources for early childhood in Malaysia are still in the infant stage and have not been expanded to include the main references or developed into big book form. The children literature in our market is not published based on educational philosophy and research, but it is produced based on profit. The process of…

This article discusses intercultural communication in Vision Schools in Malaysia. It also elaborates the extent to which the Vision Schools foster racial interaction across the three major ethnic groups: Malays, Chinese, and Indians. A total of 887 primary school students were surveyed across the Vision Schools. It was found that the intercultural…

To test the lexical restructuring hypothesis among bilingual English-language learners, English phonological awareness (PA), English vocabulary and ethnic language vocabulary (Mandarin Chinese, Malay or Tamil) were assessed among 284 kindergarteners (168 Chinese, 71 Malays and 45 Tamils) in Singapore. A multi-level regression analysis showed that…

The main focus of this article is on the multilingual literacy practices and values of English-educated university students (aged 14-20) in Brunei Darussalam, Southeast Asia. Multilingual literacy is used as a lens to examine the impact of globalization on the communicative practices of these young people and to investigate the specific ways in…

Professional music communities have realized that if they do not promote their art forms among the youth of today, the future of their music may be in question. Many local ethnic music groups have recognized the need to make the first move and go out to the audiences of the future and bring their brand of music to these audiences. Their task is to…

Malay (Rumi) is alphabetic and has a transparent, agglutinative system of affixation. We manipulated language-specific junctural phonetics in Malay and English to investigate whether morphophonemic L1-knowledge influences L2-processing. A morpheme decision task, "Does this "nonword" sound like a mono- or bi-morphemic English word?", was developed…

This paper reports on a study of Malay learners of English in Malaysia as they attempt to extend their use of English outside the classroom and thus participate in new linguistic practices. Using a multiple case study approach, the study examines the narrative accounts of learners generated through student journals and focus group discussions.…

This paper explores the way a group of pre-teens in Singapore use Malay, Chinese and English to perform identity. It is based on one case study of a Malay girl, Syafiqah, from a larger project called The Sociolinguistic Survey of Singapore 2006, and does not claim to be generalizable. The data are transcripts of recordings made on the speech…

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…

The change in the language of instruction for Mathematics under PPSMI had been opined to prejudice learners' achievements due to their weakness in the subject matter as well as in English. This study sought to analyse 186 urban and rural Primary 4 pupils' Mathematics achievements in tests using English and English/Bahasa Malaysia presentations.…