Knowledge of Linguistic Cues among Malay EFL Students and Teachers’ Practices in the Teaching of Reading Skills

Abstract

The objectives of this study were to investigate the reading ability of Malay students at primary and secondary schools, and teachers‟ practices in the teaching of reading skills. Miller‟s (1995) Reading Assessment Techniques, which comprised six tests, were used to test word and parsing identification miscues and reading comprehension. The subjects were 1989 students and 360 teachers from both rural and urban schools in Perak and Terengganu. Findings show that the majority of students were able to recognize linguistic cues at the word level. However, they had poor recognition of phrases and clauses, thus facing difficulties in processing sentences, especially complex sentences and main ideas in discourse (Ibrahim, Mohamed Nor, Abu, & Atan, 2007). Hence, the majority of students (Year 5, Form 1, 2 and 4) were unable to read textbooks provided by the Malaysian Ministry of Education because of higher readability levels (Carrell, 2001; Nation & Deweerdt, 2001). These findings could be attributed to the fact that teachers did not address the knowledge of linguistic cues in their reading lessons because they felt that such knowledge should be taught implicitly or during grammar lessons.