Abstract:

The Malaysian government has initiated many policies to improve the education quality of Orang Asli, an indigenous minority community in Peninsular Malaysia. However, functional literacy level among Orang Asli indigenous pre-schoolers is below the national average with lack of basic reading, writing and numeracy proficiency. Therefore, as part of a bigger research project that investigated the effectiveness of Comprehensive Emergent Literacy Model (CELM) (Rhode, 2015), that was carried out at eight Orang Asli pre-schools adopted by a non-governmental organisation, SUKA Society in Malaysia, this research reports findings of one-to-one interviews conducted among nine non-trained indigenous Orang Asli teachers. The purpose of the interview is to investigate their role in the development of emergent reading skills among the Semai indigenous pre-schoolers. The qualitative findings indicate acceptance of the use of CELM in the development of English language emergent reading skills. However, there were various challenges raised by the interviewees involving facilities, infrastructure, parent commitment, teaching pedagogy and professional development as childhood education educators. This study augurs well for the development of early childhood literacy aligned to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 4), of quality education especially among the indigenous community of Malaysia and guides future research to support the development of early literacy among Orang Asli pre-schoolers.

Keywords:

Early literacy, emergent reading skills, Malaysia, non-trained Indigenous Orang Asli Teachers, Semai indigenous pre-schoolers.