Bilingual first language acquisition in Malay and English : a morphological and suprasegmental study in the development of plural expressions in a bilingual child

This thesis investigates the development of plural marking in a child raised in Malay and English simultaneously, from the morphological and prosodic perspective. For the morphological plural development, the child’s plural acquisition is analysed within the Processability Theory (PT) framework de Bot (1992) de Bot (1992) thus widening PT’s typological range of application to a language such as Malay, which belongs to the Austronesian family (Dryer & Haspelmath, 2013). PT has been tested for morphological development in L2 English (Di Biase, Kawaguchi, & Yamaguchi, 2015; Johnston, 2000) and several typologically different languages as well as bilingual first language acquisition (BFLA) such as Japanese-English (Itani-Adams, 2013). However, PT has not been empirically tested for any language of the Austronesian family nor in a Bilingual First Language Acquisition (BFLA) constellation involving Malay and English. The Malay-English language pair is interesting because of the remarkably different linguistic mechanisms used for encoding plurality in the two languages; morphologically, Malay marks plurality through distinct forms of reduplication such as rumah-rumah ‘houses’, buah-buahan’ (plural form of buah ‘fruit’) and bukit-bukau ‘hills’ (Sew, 2007). In contrast, English uses morphological inflections -s suffixed to the stem, e.g., cat/cats, dog/dogs, book/books (Carstairs-McCarthy, 2002). Malay reduplication, as previously shown, involves more than a single word, however, functionally speaking it is equivalent to one word plus a marker of plurality. Thus, prosodic mechanisms play a crucial role in distinguishing between mere repetition and grammatical reduplication in Malay (Gil, 2005). Since plurality is expressed very differently in each language, this study investigates how a bilingual child develops simultaneously two grammatical systems. The participant in this research is a female child named Rina, who was raised in Malay-English environment from birth. This investigation comprises of two parts; first is the longitudinal investigation of her plural acquisition from age 2;10 to 3;10. During this period, Rina was living in Australia, where the environmentally predominant language was English. The second complementary part is an investigation of Rina’s plural marking systems at age 4;8 when she had returned to Malaysia, where the predominant environmental language was Malay. For the longitudinal study, the database for the analyses was obtained from separate Malay and English recording sessions, which were conducted weekly from age 2;10 to 3;10. Likewise, the data for Rina’s plural expression at 4;8 was also obtained from separate Malay and English environment recordings. For the morphological plural development, results indicate that Rina developed two different systems to mark plurality in Malay and English. Her plural marking developed in the sequence predicted by PT. However, though she clearly distinguished the two languages, bidirectional influences from English to Malay and Malay to English were found in the corpus, both in the longitudinal study as well as at age 4;8. In the longitudinal study, it was found that in expressing plurals in Malay and English, Rina used various linguistic devices: one of the predominant strategies she employed in both languages was iteration, a strategy in which Rina expressed more than one objects by repeating the lexical item according to the number of individuated entities (hence four cats would be expressed as cat cat cat cat). Reduplication, the target grammatical Malay plural, only emerged at 3;8. Thus, we examine the prosodic development of the child’s iteration up till the emergence of reduplication. Findings indicate that the development from iteration to reduplication is gradual; the main acoustic correlate that she employed during the longitudinal study was final-syllable lengthening. She only began differentiating various prosodic mechanisms (such as pausing, duration and pitch) to distinguish repetition and reduplication in her plural marking at age 4;8. This study offers a new perspective on the interplay between the two languages in the early stages of grammatical development in a bilingual child. The specific features of plurality in Malay and English and how they develop in the bilingual child may shed light on the applicability of PT to BFLA. Also, the link between the child’s morphological development and prosodic mechanisms show that in acquiring the prosodic structures of reduplication, Rina creates partial and increasingly specific analyses of the grammatical forms, gradually approaching the conventional adult form

Towards a new framework of English language learning in Malaysian preschools

At the preschool level in Malaysia, all preschools, including those from public and private sectors are required to follow the guidelines stated in the National Preschool Standard-based Curriculum (NPSC) issued by the Ministry of Education (MOE) in 2017. However, the NPSC is very general and schools are not provided with any further guidance on the program, which leads to some preschools, mainly private ones, to supplement their curriculum by subscribing to various private education franchisors available on the market. There seems to be a need to propose improvements to current curriculum practices. It is proposed that this is best done by investigating the theoretical foundations of language learning. In particular, this paper discusses Pienemann‟s Processability Theory (1998, 2005) and elaborates on the Developmentally Moderated Focus-on-Form instruction (DMFonF) (Di Biase, 2002,2008). It proposes the development of a new model of English language learning based on the latter leading towards a new framework aiming to assist teachers, linguists and syllabus-designers to create a developmentally moderated English curriculum

Digital trends in language and literature : Asia and the 21st century

This special issue of Asiatic, themed Digital Trends in Language and Literature: Asia and the 21st century, was born in the context of International Conference on Language and Literature 2020 (ICLL 2020) organised at International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM) on 15-17 January 2020. The conference was a collaboration between IIUM and Western Sydney University (WSU), Australia, and was also supported by Jinan University, Guangzhou, China. The event attracted a total of one hundred regular paper submissions, focusing on numerous contemporary and emerging topics related to language and literary digitalisation in Asia. The conference was held, fortunately, just before the COVID-19 pandemic struck the world. From that time until the publication of this issue, the world has undergone a sweeping digital transformation in the way people and institutions interact and operate in their daily lives. In a way, the theme of the conference in January 2020 serves as a harbinger of the shift to online and digital platforms, which are becoming progressively normalised in the wake of the COVID-19 viral attack worldwide

Instructing Malaysian children with HFASD in English as a second language

Autism awareness has recently increased globally, as evidenced by the increasing numbers of parents reported to be seeking advice on raising children with autism. In Malaysia, it is still unclear how children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) acquire English in the ESL context. To shed some light on the issue, this paper examines how three high-functioning Malaysian children with ASD (HFASD) acquired English morphology, specifically the English plural structures from the Developmentally Moderated Focus-on-Form (DMFonF) instruction. DMFonF is an instructional approach introduced by Di Biase, which combines Pienemann’s Processability Theory developmental stages and Long’s Focus on Form feedback. Using DMFonF for sixteen weeks, the children were taught to produce English lexical and phrasal plural structures (noun + suffix- s and plural agreement within the NP) in the appropriate contexts. Data were collected at 4 points; T1 (week 5), T2 (week 9), T3 (week 13), and T4 (week 16). Results show that they acquired the English lexical and grammatical plurals taught in the DMFonF lessons faster than normally developing children did in past studies. The findings suggest that DMFonF not only effectively facilitates the acquisition of English lexicon but also activates grammatical development among children with ASD in the Malaysian context

The development of plural expressions in a Malay-English bilingual child

In a postcolonial country such as Malaysia, English plays an important role in governance, education and popular culture. With English now becoming the lingua franca of the globalised world, many Malaysian urban families use English to speak to their children at home, in conjunction with the Malay language or other ethnic languages. Recognising the important relationship between the two languages, this paper investigates early bilingual development of Malay and English focusing specifically on the development of plural marking in a child raised simultaneously in these typologically distant languages. These two languages express plurals differently: Malay through various forms of reduplication and English by morphological marking on nouns. But how does the child manage to learn, simultaneously, such divergent systems? In order to shed some light on this question, a bilingual child growing up in these two languages was audio- and video- recorded in each language over 6 months, that is from 3 years 4 months (3;4) to 3 years 10 months (3;10). Results suggest that though the child appeared to develop two distinct systems of plurality in Malay and English, the two developing systems also manifested considerable cross-linguistic influence in both directions. Implications for the study of world Englishes are discussed

Bilingual development of Malay and English : the case of plural marking

In a postcolonial country such as Malaysia, English plays an important role in governance, education and popular culture. With English now becoming the lingua franca of the globalized world, many Malaysian urban families use English to speak to their children at home, as well as the Malay language or other ethnic languages (Mabella, 2013). Recognizing the important relationship between the two languages, this paper investigates the early bilingual development of Malay and English. This paper, focusing specifically on the development of plural marking in Malay and English in a child raised in two languages that are typologically distant and express plurals differently; Malay plurals are expressed in various forms of reduplication and English plurals are typically morphologically marked on nouns with suffix /-s/. But how does the child manage to learn, simultaneously, such divergent systems? In order to shed some light on this question, a child growing up bilingually in these two languages was audio and video recorded in each language over 5 months, that is from 3 years 4 months (3;04 ) to 3 years 9 months (3;09). Results suggest that though the child appears to develop two distinct systems of pluralities in Malay and English, the two developing grammars also manifest cross-linguistic influences