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