Abstract
Diglossia involves a linguistic state with different spoken dialects and literary forms. Cases of ‘modern diglossia’ consist of speech communities that encompass a local identity through the spoken dialect, and a cultural identity through an ancestral or neighboring countries’ standard written form. Two speech communities within Singapore closely follow this definition of diglossia: that of Malay and Tamil. To date, there is a growing body of evidence from the Malay diglossic community that the child’s own speech sounds influence their spelling (Jalil S, Rickard Liow S, Applied Psycholinguist 29:535–552, 2008; Treiman R, Goswami U, Tincoff R, Leevers H, Child Develop 68:229–245, 1997). However, there is very little, if any, published work that has examined spelling errors among Tamil speaking children. Hence, in this chapter, we examine and extend the work on diglossic spelling by looking at how the home language environment influences the oral language children rely on in the early stages of literacy.
This chapter is divided into four sections. In the beginning segment of the chapter, literature pertaining to reading and spelling skills of children is examined in relation to the learning of Malay and Tamil. The second section describes the main characteristics of the Malay and Tamil orthography, while considering that the linguistic features of each language has undergone some changes across history. The third section deals with a study of the spelling performance by Malay and Tamil children in Singapore. Discussion of the research findings and their implications for literacy instruction in classrooms is shared in the last section.
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Notes
- 1.
Aksharas can represent consonants with inherent vowels, short vowels and dipthongs (for a more comprehensive description, see O’Brien et al., 2020b).
- 2.
Primary education lasts 6 years and is compulsory for all Singapore citizens. Primary education starts after Kindergarten at ages 6 to 7.
- 3.
Script which shares features of both alphabet and syllabary writing systems. It includes symbols for consonants and vowels where each consonant has an inherent vowel and phonetic sound that can be changed or muted by means of diacritics or other modifications.
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Acknowledgement
This study was funded by the Education Research Funding Programme, National Institute of Education (NIE), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, project no. OER 09/14RB. The views expressed in this paper are the author’s and do not necessarily represent the views of NIE. The authors would like to thank the participating children, parents and schools, and the research team, including Ashwini D/O Chandrasaharan and Khairunnisa Bte Mohd Akip, for assistance with data scoring. Portions of the paper were presented at the annual conference for ARWA, 2019, Goa, India.
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Habib, M., Arshad, N.A., O’Brien, B.A. (2022). Acquiring Literacy in the Diglossic Contexts of Malay and Tamil in Singapore: Problems and Prospects in Early Childhood Classrooms. In: Saiegh-Haddad, E., Laks, L., McBride, C. (eds) Handbook of Literacy in Diglossia and in Dialectal Contexts. Literacy Studies, vol 22. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80072-7_13
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