Quality and equality: Verifying “My reading experience” questionnaire for a sustainable literacy education framework

¹ Department of Management and Humanities, Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS, Malaysia
² Faculty of Arts and Social Science, Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman, Kampar Perak, Malaysia
³ Faculty of Languages and Communication, Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris (UPSI), Malaysia
⁴ Department of Language and Literacy Education, Universiti Malaya, Malaysia

^* Corresponding author: chong_suli@utp.edu.my

Abstract

This paper reports one aspect of a larger project that set out to narrow the literacy gap among Malaysia’s rural and urban children in terms of their literacy achievement. Using Perak as a case-state, this overall project scrutinises why despite the Education Ministry being the biggest recipient of the recent national budget 2020, with an estimated allocation of RM64.1billion, there are still children especially in rural schools who are unable to master the ability to read and write, even in their own mother tongue language. Through this project’s on-going work which attempts to connect the theories of literacy with actual-on-the-ground issues of children’s reading experience especially in rural schools, important matters were flagged up. This paper will highlight these matters as they are uncovered vis-à-vis the verification of “My reading experience” questionnaire which was one of the main research tools that was used for this project. Mainly, these matters were located along three aspects of literacy i.e. context, definition and language as they relate to how the questionnaire was designed. This has important implications towards how a sustainable literacy education framework can be shaped.