When Malay Comes First, English Reading Can Collapse — Unless Teachers Explain the Difference

 

Children who learn to read Malay in kindergarten and only meet English in Year 1 often run into sudden, confusing difficulty. The problem is rarely a lack of intelligence. It is a clash of two writing systems that look similar but work very differently.

In Malay, almost every letter stands for one sound. The only common exception is the letter e, which has two sounds: e pepet and e taling. English is not like that. Most English letters represent more than one sound, and many words cannot be read by applying Malay rules. When no one explains this difference clearly, a child who was a confident reader in Malay starts guessing, omitting letters, or forcing English words into Malay pronunciation. Frustration follows. The child is then labelled “dyslexic” or “disengaged” when the real issue is incomplete teaching.

 

I saw this clearly in 2017 with a bright, confident boy who would almost certainly have been called dyslexic. He was not stupid. He was applying the only consistent system he had been taught.

Please listen to this video:LINK 

He read for as something like “foe” because Malay o has one sound and he had not been shown the English possibilities. He sounded holidays reasonably well but dropped the final s. He was so sure about the word 'have' that he wanted to cancel the e — exactly what the word would look like if it were Malay. He pronounced time with a Malay e sound. Lumut gave him no trouble at all because it follows Malay rules. When and come caused problems because those sound combinations do not exist in the same way in Malay; he read come as a Malay speaker would (“cho-may”).

 

The boy was not confused because he lacked ability. He was confused because no one had told him, in simple terms: “English letters do not work like Malay letters. Most of them can make more than one sound.” Once that single fact is missing, every new English word becomes a trap.

 

This pattern is still common. A child who masters a transparent language first and then meets an opaque one without explicit contrast teaching will often look like a poor reader. The label that follows — dyslexic, lazy, disengaged — can shut the child down for years.

 

The solution is not more guessing or more “context clues” at the beginning. It is honest, early explanation of the difference between the two languages, correct English letter sounds, systematic teaching of high-frequency words, and practice that lets the child see how English words are actually built. When that foundation is given, many children who were written off as having a reading disability simply start reading.

 

The 2017 case was not an isolated incident. It was a warning we still need to heed.