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

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.