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Learning to Read in Multilingual Malaysia: A Focus

on Bahasa Melayu, Tamil and Chinese
Heather Winskel
[email protected]
Southern Cross University,
Coffs Harbour, Australia

ABSTRACT

Learning to read fluently is an extremely important skill for all children to acquire. The current
article focuses on learning to read in the most widely spoken languages of Malaysia, namely,
the national language Bahasa Melayu, Tamil and Chinese. These three unrelated languages
have quite distinct writing systems. Bahasa Melayu uses alphabetic Rumi or Roman script,
Tamil has an alphasyllabary, and Chinese has a logographic or morphosyllabic writing system.
Moreover, many of these children are learning to speak and read in more than one language.
When we consider the task of these biscriptal learners, a complex picture emerges, as they may
have to learn to map different phonological and orthographic systems. Furthermore, many
children in Malaysia have the additional challenge of learning English as a second language.
First, a brief review of the characteristics of the three main languages and their orthographies
is given. Subsequently, research on phonological awareness, an important skill associated with
success in reading, is reviewed. Initially, phonological awareness and reading in single
language studies is examined prior to reviewing some research on bilingual learners. As these
three languages have rich morphological systems, we will also briefly examine some research
on morphological awareness and reading. A review of the literature reveals that children who
speak a language with a similar orthography to a second language may have some advantage
when learning to read that second language in comparison to children whose first and second
languages and orthographies are unrelated.

Keywords: Bahasa Melayu; Chinese; Learning to read; Malaysia; Tamil

INTRODUCTION

Learning to read fluently is an essential skill for all children to acquire, and children who fail
to learn this skill suffer the long-term consequences and disadvantage of this impairment. An
important consideration is that many children are growing up in diverse bilingual or
multilingual contexts such as Malaysia, and learning to speak and read in more than one
language. This creates particular challenges for children growing up in such multilingual
contexts where they are learning languages and scripts that can be quite unrelated and
distinctive in their characteristics. This article will first examine what the ultimate goal of
reading is and how it is achieved across different orthographies. We will then focus on the
characteristics of the three main languages of Malaysia, namely Bahasa Melayu, Tamil and
Chinese, prior to examining research on phonological awareness and reading in unilingual and
bilingual or multilingual contexts. As these languages have rich morphological systems, we
will also briefly examine some research on morphological awareness and reading. Finally, we
will look at the implications of this research in relation to the multilingual Malaysian context.
The ultimate purpose of reading is constructing meaning from written texts based on
visually encoded information (Perfetti & Dunlap, 2008). It is more than a simple matter of
decoding and recognizing or understanding individual words. Initially, the child has to “crack
the code” of how their particular language maps onto its orthography but then go beyond that
initial stage and process other linguistic elements such as words, morphemes and sentence

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structures in conjunction with their world knowledge to construct a coherent representation of

the text (Snowling & Hulme, 2011). It is a highly complex process, and thus, takes time to
develop these high-level skills.
The initial fundamental process in learning to read in any language involves a process
of matching the visual symbols or graphemes on the page to the sound system or phonology of
the spoken language. Typically, the phonology of a language and the orthography that the
language maps onto favour different sized segmentation units or grain sizes (Ziegler &
Goswami, 2005). Grain size refers to the lexical units that are converted into phonological
structures when reading different orthographies; hence, the size of the mapping unit can be for
instance the phoneme, syllable or whole word (Frost, 2006). When learning to read, the child’s
task is to find shared or common segmentation or grain size units that allow a consistent or
reliable mapping between the orthography and phonology of the language (Ziegler &
Goswami, 2005). In a relatively transparent alphabetic orthography such as German, children
are able to access and map the smallest grain size of graphemes onto phonemes within their
first year of learning to read. In contrast, in English, a relatively irregular or non-transparent
orthography, children can take several years to gain a similar level of competence (Goswami,
2000, 2003).
Different writing systems pose distinct challenges to the young reader. Daniels and
Share (2018) describe a new multiple dimensions of complexity framework that accounts for
other writing systems besides the more traditionally studied European orthographies. This
framework includes characteristics such as spatial arrangement and nonlinearity, historical
change, spelling constancy, omission of phonological elements, allography, dual purpose
letters, ligaturing, visual complexity and inventory size. Visual complexity of the particular
script contributes to the difficulty in learning to read (Chang, Plaut & Perfetti, 2016). This includes
the size of the grapheme inventory and the relative complexity and similarity of the graphemes in
the script.
Learning to read in the most widely spoken languages of Malaysia, the national
language Bahasa Melayu, Tamil and Chinese, offer quite distinctive challenges to the young
learner. These three orthographies utilise different grain or segment sizes of graphemes to
sound units. Bahasa Melayu uses alphabetic Rumi or Roman script, Tamil has an
alphasyllabary, and Chinese has a logographic or morphosyllabic writing system. In addition,
many children in Malaysia have the additional challenge of learning English with its
notoriously irregular grapheme-phoneme correspondences. First, a brief review of the
characteristics of these three different languages and their orthographies is given.

BAHASA MELAYU

Bahasa Melayu is a multi-syllabic language, and the syllable is a highly salient unit in the
spoken language, which has clear syllable boundaries. Subject-verb-object (SVO) is the
prominent word order similar in this respect to English. In contrast to English, in place of
inflectional morphology, Malaysian similar to other Southeast Asian languages, typically
utilises separate words or lexemes.
Bahasa Melayu uses the same Latin-based alphabetic script as English, but in contrast
has a high degree of orthographic transparency. It has a highly transparent writing system with
almost one-to-one correspondence between phonemes and graphemes. The exception is the
letter ‘e’, which has two phonemic forms /ə/ as in ‘emak’ (mother) and /e/ as in ‘ekor’ (tail).
(For a more detailed review refer to Rickard Liow, 2014 and Winskel & Lee, 2014). One
particular feature of written Bahasa Melayu is that it has a rich transparent system of
morphemes or affixations (Nik Safiah, Farid, Hashim, & Abdul Hamid, 2004). There are
irregularities, however, in how some affixes are spelt as they change depending on the context.
An additional consideration is that every day colloquial language uses fairly simple

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morphemes, but in an educational context, children have to learn to read and write rather long
multisyllabic words.

TAMIL

Tamil is a South Dravidian language with an ancient literary tradition (Sarma, 2014). It is a
morphologically rich language and employs agglutinative grammar, where suffixes are used to
mark noun class, number, and case, verb tense and other grammatical categories. Word order
in Tamil is also flexible although it favours subject–object–verb (SOV) order.
Tamil orthography has been classified as an alphasyllabary (Nag & Narayanan, 2019).
It is considered to be neither alphabetic nor syllabic (Share & Daniels, 2016). Furthermore, it
has been described as “a syllable writing system with identifiable phonetic elements” (Joshi &
McBride-Chang, 2019 p.4). Tamil is considered to be a fairly transparent orthography. Similar
to other Indic Brahmi-derived scripts, it has akshara (Bright, 2000). Akshara are units of speech
and in writing consist of a vowel or consonant, or a consonant-vowel combination (See Nag &
Narayanan, 2019 for a detailed description). It is considered to be relatively transparent
although it does have irregularities. It has a relatively modest symbol set of 400 to 700 in
comparison to other Indic alphasyllabaries, which is larger than alphabetic Bahasa Melayu but
much less than Chinese. It also has a fairly linear or sequential arrangement of graphemes in
comparison to other Indic scripts.

CHINESE

Grammatically, Chinese shares some similarities with Malaysian in that they are both analytic
or isolating languages, and thus, lack inflectional morphology (i.e., do not have agreement,
case, gender/number/definiteness on noun phrases, tense-marking on verbs). Similar to Bahasa
Melayu, in place of inflectional morphology, Chinese typically utilises separate words or
lexemes. Moreover, Chinese has numeral classifiers similar in this respect to Bahasa Melayu
(Salehuddin, 2014; Salehhuddin & Winskel, 2009). Chinese is also a tonal language. Chinese
has been traditionally considered to be monosyllabic but most modern words are disyllabic.
In contrast to Bahasa Melayu or English, Chinese maps characters to language at the
morpheme and syllable level, rather than the phoneme level. Each Chinese character represents
a morpheme as well as a syllable (Ho & Bryant, 1997; Wang, Perfetti, & Liu, 2003). There are
a large number of visually distinct and complicated Chinese characters to learn. This is
highlighted by noting that each character can consist of one to 36 overlapping ‘strokes’. There
are about 3,000 and 4,600 frequently used Chinese characters that need to be learned by skilled
readers (Yu & Reichle, 2017). Another notable feature of Chinese is that words are not
demarcated by clear word boundaries.
THE IMPORTANCE OF PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS SKILLS AND READING

Phonological awareness is one of the critical skills in the acquisition of reading in alphabetic
orthographies (Adams, 1990; Bradley & Bryant, 1983; Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley, 1993;
Stanovich, Cunningham, & Cramer, 1984; Tunmer & Nesdale, 1985; Wagner, Torgesen, &
Rashotte 1994). It can be defined as awareness that spoken words can be broken down or
manipulated into smaller units of sound. It has also been found that children who are having
difficulties in learning to read and write often have difficulties in phonological awareness tasks
(Hansen & Bowey, 1994; Snowling, Goulandris, Bowlby, & Howell, 1986). Importantly,
training children with phonological awareness skills has been found to facilitate reading
acquisition (Bradley & Bryant, 1983; Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley, 1995; Byrne, Fielding-
Barnsley, & Ashley, 2000; Hatcher, Hulme, & Snowling 2004; Hindson et al., 2005).

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Phonological awareness skills are generally trained and assessed through children performing
mental manipulations on speech, for example by clapping out the number of syllables in a
word, deleting the initial sound of a word or detecting similarities between words etc.
(McBride-Chang, 1995).
Previous research has predominantly focused on phonological awareness in children
learning to read a single language, despite the fact that many children these days are growing
up in bilingual or multilingual environments. Cross-linguistic research indicates that the level
of phonological awareness initially used in reading and spelling is shaped by the orthography
to be learned and the phonology of the spoken language corresponding to that orthography
(Goswami, 1999). When we consider the task of the bilingual or multilingual child learning to
speak and read in more than one language, a complex picture emerges, as they may have to
learn to map different phonological and orthographic systems, often concurrently. A
considerable amount of research has been conducted on literacy development in European
languages, but much less research has been conducted on Asian languages.
SOME RESEARCH ON ASIAN LANGUAGES AND PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS AND
READING

The oral characteristics of the child’s language affects early phonological awareness
development (Gottardo, Pasquarella, Chen, & Ramirez, 2015). A strong association between
phoneme awareness and reading and spelling ability has been found in speakers of European
alphabetic orthographies (Bradley & Bryant, 1983; Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley, 1993;
Goswami & Bryant, 1990; Hulme et al., 2002; MacLean, Bryant, & Bradley, 1987; Wimmer
& Goswami, 1994). In contrast, research on Asian languages has highlighted the syllable as an
additional important processing unit when reading alphasyllabaries, which have properties of
both alphabetic and syllabic scripts. For example, research investigating children acquiring
Kannada, a semi-syllabic Indo-Dravidian script, indicates that the optimal unit for beginners is
the syllable, although more proficient readers and spellers can also manipulate phonemes
(Padakannaya, Rekka, Vaid, & Joshi, 2002). Vaid and Gupta (2002) also interpreted their
results on Devanagari, an alphasyllabic orthography, widely used to represent Indian
languages, as supporting a partly syllabic and partly phonemic level of segmentation. (Also see
a more recent study conducted by Rao, Vaid & Chen, 2017 that compared Hindi and Kannada-
Hindi bilinguals). Tamil has also been shown to represent information at both the phoneme
and syllable levels (Bhuvaneshwari & Padakannaya, 2014).
A study on spelling development in Malaysian children investigated whether there was
evidence of phoneme–grapheme encoding and/or whether they relied on the more salient
speech units, that is, syllables and morphemes (Rickard Liow & Lee, 2004). Rickard Liow and
Lee (2004) examined the errors made by 97 children, aged six- to eight-years old, spelling stem
and multisyllabic affixed words. Errors were analysed in terms of whether they preserved the
syllable or not. They concluded that even though the language is very predictable at the
phoneme–grapheme level, early spelling tends to be based on encoding at the syllable and
morpheme levels rather than the phoneme level. They suggested that as syllables are such
salient units and receive equal stress, children can pick up sizable reading–spelling units
without accessing phoneme-grapheme correspondences.
In a study on Bahasa Indonesia, a language closely related to Bahasa Melayu, Winskel
and Widjaja (2007) also focused on the grain size predominantly used by children when
learning to read and spell. A range of tasks assessing different levels of phonological awareness
as well as letter knowledge, reading familiar words and nonwords, and spelling stem and
affixed words, were administered to 73 children in Grade 1 and subsequently one year later in
Grade 2. The results, in general, indicated that the phoneme was the prominent unit in the early
acquisition of reading and spelling in Indonesian, as it was found to be a concurrent predictor

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of reading for both word and nonword reading for Grade 1 and Grade 2 children. Furthermore,
an analysis of word and nonword reading errors revealed that errors were predominantly
nonword or phonological errors, which supports this level of processing. However, when the
task was to spell multisyllabic affixed words, an awareness of both phonemes and syllables
appeared to be advantageous and facilitated this process. In sum, these results indicated that
the phoneme was the prominent phonological unit in the early acquisition of reading and
spelling in Indonesian, but the syllable also played a significant role, particularly when reading
long multisyllabic affixed words. In contrast to the Malaysian study (Rickard Liow & Lee,
2004), the phoneme was highlighted as the more prominent unit than the syllable in the
Indonesian study. One feasible explanation for this difference is that in Bahasa Indonesia, there
is a direct correspondence between the names of letters and the sounds they make, whereas in
Bahasa Melayu the names of the letters are similar to those of the English alphabet, and hence,
do not directly correspond.
Lee and Wheldall (2011) further investigated word reading, letter knowledge and
phonological awareness in 46 Grade 1 Malaysian children. Eleven of these children were
identified as low-progress readers. Results revealed that the syllable was the most influential
predictor but the phoneme also played a significant role in word reading. Children’s reading
performance on words with different syllable structures was also examined. Words with a
simple open CV syllable structure were found to be easier to decode than words with digraphs,
diphthongs, or the vowel e. As the complexity of syllabic structure increased, there was a
corresponding decline in performance. The position of phonemes in a word was also found to
affect word recognition performance. Words with a digraph at the end (e.g., batang) were easier
to decode than words with a digraph at the beginning (e.g., syarikat). Moreover, words with
two vowel graphemes belonging to different syllables appearing together in the middle of a
word (e.g., soal) or at the end of a word (e.g., tua) proved problematic to beginner readers, due
to confusion over the location of the syllable boundary. In addition, it was found that shorter
stem words were easier to read than longer multisyllabic words with derivational affixes.
There is a growing wealth of research being currently conducted on the main languages
and writing systems of Malaysia. Extensive research has been conducted on Chinese but also
research on learning to read the Malay language and Tamil is rapidly growing and contributing
to our understanding of learning to read in these languages. For example, Lee and Al Otaiba
(2017) have examined spelling development in kindergarten children and Lee, Low and Lee
(2019) have investigated phoneme-grapheme connections in Malay word building. In addition,
some very interesting and relevant research on Indian writing systems is included in the recent
publication by Joshi and McBride-Chang (2019).
In sum, the characteristics of the child’s spoken language affects early phonological
awareness development (Gottardo et al., 2015). In Chinese, it appears to be the syllable that is
the salient unit whereas in Malay and Tamil scripts, both the phoneme and syllable feature.

PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS AND READING IN BILINGUALS AND MULTILINGUALS

Research on reading acquisition across diverse languages indicates that the different grain sizes
favoured by different orthographies are shaped by both the phonological characteristics of the
spoken language and the particular orthography it maps onto (e.g., Borzone de Manrique &
Signorini, 1994; Caravolas & Bruck, 1993; Cheung et al., 2001; Cossu et al., 1988; Harris &
Hatano, 1999; Wimmer & Goswami, 1990). This means that children learning to read two or
more languages, may have to switch mapping strategy dependent on the particular language
and orthography they are learning to read. Moreover, reading strategies and behaviours from
the first language may transfer to the second language and so facilitate reading.

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Before we look at the research on reading acquisition in bilinguals, it is important to

distinguish between sequential and simultaneous bilingualism. Simultaneous childhood
bilingualism refers to a child acquiring two languages at the same time from birth, for example
when the parents speak two different languages (Baker, 2006). In contrast, sequential
bilingualism occurs when for example a child learns one language at home then goes to school
where a different language is learnt. For example, their home language could be Tamil or
Chinese but when they go to school, they learn Bahasa Melayu and/or English. Children often
have the additional challenge of learning to read a language they are not very familiar with or
fluent in, which creates additional challenges for the learner.
The research on reading in bilinguals has predominantly focused on sequential rather
than simultaneous bilinguals. In addition, a prominent focus of this research has been on
learning English as a second language. One of the first studies to investigate reading in
bilingual children was conducted on Spanish-speaking children learning English as a second
language in the USA (Durgunoğlu, Nagy, & Hancin-Bhatt, 1993). They found that
phonological awareness and reading ability in Spanish, the first language (L1), predicted
reading performance in English, the second language (L2).
The relative transparency or regularity of the languages being learned appears to have
an effect on processing and phonological skills in bilingual children. A study comparing
Spanish-English bilinguals with Cantonese-English bilinguals found that the Spanish-English
bilinguals outperformed both Cantonese-English bilinguals and English monolinguals on a
phoneme segmentation counting task (Bialystok, Majumder, & Martin, 2003). The Chinese–
English bilinguals had the most difficulty with this task. This was attributed to either the greater
relative transparency or regularity of Spanish orthography and/or that the Spanish-English
bilinguals were learning two languages that had similar phonological structure and alphabetic
orthographic system whereas the Chinese-English bilinguals were learning two languages that
were phonologically and orthographically distinct.
The influence of the characteristics of the first language on processing strategies used
when reading a second language, English, has also been investigated in children in Singapore
with either Mandarin Chinese or Bahasa Indonesia (closely related to Bahasa Melayu) as their
first language (Rickard Liow & Poon, 1998). In the children with Mandarin Chinese as their
first language. Rickard Liow and Poon (1998) found that they showed greater reliance on visual
orthographic processes than children with Bahasa Indonesia as their first language. In contrast,
the children with Bahasa Indonesia as their first language displayed well developed alphabetic
phonological awareness skills when reading English as their second language.
Differences in phonological awareness skills were also found in the languages spoken
by Punjabi-English bilingual speaking children living in the U.K. Stuart-Smith and Martin
(1999) assessed a range of phonological awareness and reading skills in both languages spoken
by Punjabi-English children. Punjabi is written using Gurmukhi orthography, which is an
alphasyllabary and has inherent vowels for all consonants. They found different phonological
awareness skills were emphasized in the two different languages. In English, there was an
advantage of alliteration, rhyme judgment and phoneme segmentation; whereas in Punjabi
there was an advantage for onset and coda isolation and phoneme blending (the child was
required to identify a word when it is pronounced with each sound segment, e.g. r-a-t makes
the word ‘rat’).
In another study, phonological awareness skills were assessed in both languages spoken
by Greek-English and English-Greek bilinguals (Loizou & Stuart, 2003). Both English and
Greek have alphabetic orthographies. The bilinguals were compared to both monolingual
Greek and monolingual English children. The bilingual English-Greek children were born in
England with Greek parents and the dominant language was English, whereas the Greek-
English bilinguals were born in Greece and attended a pre-school where they were exposed to

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both Greek and English, but the dominant language was Greek. They found that English-Greek
bilingual children outperformed monolingual English children but this was not replicated in
the Greek-English bilingual children. They explained this “selective bilingual enhancement
effect” in terms of children learning a second language, Greek, that is phonologically simpler
than the first language, English. In addition, they found that English-Greek bilingual children
performed significantly better than Greek-English bilinguals, in particular on phoneme
awareness tasks, which suggests that phonological complexity of the bilingual child’s
languages impacts on cross-language transfer. This may have direct applications to children
who learn to read transparent or regular Bahasa Melayu as their first language and then learn
to read irregular English as the second orthography. Another consideration is that as
phonological awareness is a precursor to reading, children who learn to read in a second
language that has a similar phonological structure and orthographic system to their first
language may have some advantage in comparison to children who are learning to read in
languages that are phonologically and orthographically different.
Additional studies have examined cross-language transfer when the scripts being learnt
are quite different or unrelated and favour different grain sizes, for example the first language
is either logographic or alphasyllabic and the second language is alphabetic (e.g. Chiappe &
Siegel, 1999; Gottardo et al., 2001; Nag, 2007; Stuart-Smith & Martin, 1997; Wang & Geva,
2003). Gottardo et al. (2001) found that in a logographic orthography, Cantonese (L1), rhyme
detection made a unique contribution to reading in the alphabetic second orthography, English.
In a more recent study, Pasquarella, Chen, Gottardo and Geva (2014) examined cross-
language transfer of word reading accuracy and word reading fluency in 51 Spanish–English
and 64 Chinese–English bilinguals. Both groups of children completed parallel measures of
phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, word reading accuracy, and word reading
fluency in their first language (L1) and in English, their second language (L2), in Grade 1 and
then subsequently in Grade 2. Cross-language transfer of word reading accuracy was found
only in the Spanish–English bilinguals. In contrast, cross-language transfer of word reading
fluency was found in both the Spanish–English bilinguals and the Chinese–English bilinguals.
These results suggest that transfer of word reading accuracy, in particular, is dependent on the
structural similarities between the L1 and L2 scripts.
Another study with an interesting design investigated transference between Oriya, a
language spoken in India that has an alphasyllabic script, and English with its alphabetic script
(Mishra & Stainthorp, 2007). Mishra and Stainthorp (2007) assessed various levels of
phonological awareness, word and pseudoword reading in both languages of 99 Grade 5
children. Approximately half of the children attended schools where they were first taught to
read in Oriya in Grade 1 and then English in Grade 2. The other half of the children attended
schools where they were taught first to read English in Grade 1 and then Oriya in Grade 2.
They found a complex non-symmetrical cross-language facilitation effect between
phonological awareness measures and reading dependent on the characteristics of the different
orthographies of the languages being learned, and whether the first language was also the first
literacy language. They found that in the children with Oriya as the first literacy language
learnt, the syllable was a predictor of reading and pseudoword reading in Oriya, and the
phoneme was not a significant predictor, even though the script represents language at both
phoneme and syllable levels. However, when English was the first literacy language, awareness
of phonemes contributed significantly to word and pseudoword reading in Oriya whereas the
syllable did not. Furthermore, awareness of phonemes in English contributed to English word
reading regardless of whether it was the first or second literacy language. In sum, this research
shows that transference of phonological awareness skills across languages is affected both by
the grain size used when reading the different orthographies and which orthography is learnt
first.

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In a recent, large Singaporean study, O’Brien, Mohamed, Yussof and Ng (2019)

examined syllable, rime, phoneme level awareness and early reading skills in 612 simultaneous
bilingual children consisting of 311 Mandarin–English bilinguals, 147 Malaysian–English
bilinguals and 163 Tamil–English bilinguals. All children were enrolled in kindergartens where
English was the medium of instruction. The various phonological awareness assessments were
administered in English only. Over a 2-year period, they found different phonological
awareness patterns emerged in the different language groups. Interestingly, they found that the
Tamil-English children showed higher performance at the phoneme level at the earliest time
point in comparison to the Malaysian-English and Chinese-English children. In the children
with Chinese and Malaysian as their first language, they found that the syllable was a relatively
more accessible phonological unit. Thus, they found an influence from the ethnic languages of
the children on their phonological development in English.
The studies that have so far been reviewed indicate that it is important to consider the
characteristics of the orthographies the bilingual children are learning and the degree of
relatedness of the languages and orthographies (Bialystok, McBride-Chang, & Luk, 2005).
Languages that have similar writing systems share common characteristics and are likely to
operate at similar grain sizes, and consequently be more amenable to language transfer. Based
on this perspective, two languages that share alphabetic orthographies such as Bahasa Melayu
and English are more likely to exhibit cross-language transfer than if one of the languages is
written using an alphabetic orthography and the other with a logographic script such as Chinese
or an alphasyllabic script such as Tamil.
Proficiency in the languages of bilinguals also plays an important role in transference
of skills when learning to read different orthographies. Bialystok et al. (2005) assessed
phonological awareness and word decoding skills in both English and Chinese in English-
Chinese bilinguals, English monolinguals and Chinese children beginning to learn English.
They found that the degree of transfer of these skills between languages was influenced by the
children’s relative level of bilingualism or proficiency in both languages as well as the type of
reading instruction received by the children.
In sum, languages with different writing systems may activate different underlying
processes used to read, which restricts the transferability of reading-related skills. However,
when the L1 and L2 are closely related, shared features pose similar processing demands and
allow L1 competencies to also operate in the L2 context. By contrast, when the two languages
and scripts are not related, the L1 skills do not facilitate L2 reading to the same extent. In
relation to the three main languages and orthographies in Malaysia, beneficial transference of
skills is more likely to occur in children whose native language is Bahasa Melayu and who
subsequently learn English as their second language in comparison to children with Tamil or
Chinese as their first language. Bahasa Melayu and English share the same alphabetic script
whereas the other scripts are unrelated. The research also highlights the importance of children
being proficient in both their native and subsequently learnt languages when learning to read.
This is particularly pertinent when learning to read a second language.

MORPHOLOGICAL AWARENESS AND READING

Morphological awareness has also been shown to be important in relation to learning to read
in many different languages and their orthographies. Morphological awareness is a higher order
cognitive ability that involves being able to manipulate morphological units in the child’s
particular language(s) (Carlisle, 1995). Importantly, morphological awareness has been found
to be related to children’s vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension (Carlisle, 1995,
2000; Kuo & Anderson, 2006; Nagy, Abbott, Vaughan, & Vermeulen, 2003; Singson, Mahony,
& Mann, 2000). Due to the prominent morphological characteristics of Bahasa Melayu, Tamil

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and Chinese, morphological awareness is likely to play an important role in developing readers
in both uniscriptal and biscriptal readers. Quite an extensive number of studies have examined
the relationship between morphological awareness and reading comprehension in Chinese
(e.g., Ku & Anderson, 2003; McBride-Chang, Shu, Zhou, Wat, & Wagner, 2003; Wang,
Cheng, & Chen, 2006). In addition, it has also been shown to be important when learning to
read Bahasa Melayu (Rickard Liow & Lee, 2004; Winskel & Widjaja, 2007). In a more recent
study, Zhang, Chin and Li (2017) examined the contribution of phonological and
morphological awareness to bilingual word reading in 131 Malaysian-English bilingual
children living in Singapore. They found a selective facilitatory transference effect from
Malaysian phonological awareness to English phonological awareness development, and also
from English morphological awareness to Malaysian morphological awareness development.
Relatively few studies have been conducted on morphological awareness and reading
in Indic scripts. A study conducted by Gafoor and Remia (2013) investigated the relationship
between morphological awareness and reading comprehension in children from grade 2 to 4
learning to read Malayalam. Malayalam, is a morphologically rich Dravidian language with an
alphasyllabary similar in this respect to Tamil. They found that morphological awareness was
directly related to phonological awareness and reading comprehension.

IMPLICATIONS AND CONCLUSIONS

The current article has focused on learning to read in the most widely spoken languages of
Malaysia, namely, the national language Bahasa Melayu, Tamil and Chinese. These languages
are not related and are quite different in the challenges they pose to young learners. Moreover,
the orthographies utilise different grain sizes of graphemes to sound units. Bahasa Melayu uses
alphabetic Rumi or Roman script, Tamil has an alphasyllabary and Chinese has a logographic
or morphosyllabic writing system. Many of these children have the challenge of learning to
speak and read in more than one language. When we consider the task of the child learning to
speak and read in more than one language, a complex picture emerges, as they may have to
learn to read in two different orthographic systems. Furthermore, many children in Malaysia
have the additional challenge of learning to read alphabetic English with its notoriously
irregular orthography.
Phonological awareness is a precursor to reading, and consequently, has been studied
extensively, particularly in European languages. Much less research has so far focused on
reading and phonological awareness skills in Asian languages and their orthographies.
Research on Asian languages has shown that the syllable is an important phonological unit as
well as the phoneme in some orthographies.
The reviewed research has found that positive transference of reading-related skills is
more likely to occur if the orthographies are related and share common grain sizes (Bialystok
et al. 2005). In relation to the Malaysian context, Bahasa Melayu and English basically share
the same alphabetic script whereas alphasyllabic Tamil and logographic Chinese have scripts
that are unrelated to each other and distinct from alphabetic orthographies. It appears from this
research that children who learn to read two languages with similar linguistic and orthographic
systems may have some advantage when learning to read the second language, whereas those
children who are learning languages that are phonologically and orthographically different may
find it more of a challenge. Thus on this basis, in the Malaysian context, transference of
reading-related skills are more likely to occur in the Bahasa Melayu-English learners than for
example when the first language is Tamil or Chinese. When children with Tamil or Chinese as
their first language enter school in Malaysia, they may experience additional challenges
learning to read in Bahasa Melayu, their second language, and consequently may need extra
support.

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Children may have the additional challenge of learning to read a language that they are
not familiar with or fluent in, for example in the Malaysian context, this could be Bahasa
Melayu or English. It is desirable that children are already familiar and fairly proficient in the
languages that they are learning to read. If children do not have this prerequisite language
knowledge, then learning to read in that language is likely to be hindered or delayed. If children
do not have this requisite linguistic knowledge and their first language uses the same script as
their second language, they may be able to decode or read the words on the page but still not
be able to understand what they read.
As well as phonological awareness, morphological awareness skills are considered to
be important as they may facilitate vocabulary knowledge and comprehension when learning
to read. Due to the prominent morphological characteristics of Bahasa Melayu, Tamil and
Chinese, morphological awareness is likely to play an important role in developing readers in
both uniscriptal and biscriptal readers. Thus, it is important to teach both phonological and
morphological awareness knowledge and skills in the classroom to facilitate the reading
process.
Another consideration is that it is important that children who are having problems in
learning to read are detected early, so that it can be remedied in a timely manner during the
child’s early development. Moreover, it is important to detect problems when learning to read
using appropriately designed assessment instruments that are applicable to the particular
language and orthography of the child. As bilingual children can have different phonological
awareness profiles in their two languages, assessing phonological and reading skills becomes
an even more complex task.
Finally, advancements in technology are having an enormous impact on children’s
development in many aspects of their lives. This includes learning to read and write through
digital texts such as via phones, tablets and computers (Barzillai & Thomson, 2018). This
creates additional challenges for both learners and educationalists. Moreover, children are also
using various digital writing devices in place of the more traditional handwriting with pencil
and paper. Recent research has found that handwriting with pencil fosters acquisition of letter
knowledge and improves visuo-spatial skills compared with keyboarding and in particular
writing with a stylus on a touchscreen (Mayer et al., 2020). Of course this may change as
technology evolves and learners adapt to the new technologies. Importantly, technology can
be used as a beneficial tool in scaffolding the learning of struggling readers (de Souza et al.,
2018; Lee, 2016, 2019; O’Brien, Habib & Onnis, 2019).

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Heather Winskel is a research scientist in psychology in the School of Health and Human
Sciences, Southern Cross University, Coffs Harbour, Australia. She has expertise in cross-
linguistic language acquisition and reading research. She is the principal editor of South and
Southeast Asian Psycholinguistics published by Cambridge University Press.

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