Malay Language Learning Difficulty by International Community: A Case Study of Postgraduate Students of UNISZA and UMT

Abstract

Acquiring knowledge, either individually or in a team, is known as learning. The mode of learning may be either supervised or unsupervised. Language learning develops communication ability in a second foreign language, such as the Malay language... Malaysia is among the countries that students around the globe visit for undergraduate and postgraduate studies. But, the international students faced communication challenges with both the local students and the academic staff due to language variations. The local students lack confidence in English, while the international students don’t understand the Malay language. The communication The Gap was pointed out as the major problem for the international students to carry out their academic activities as most lecturers deliver their classes using Bahasa Melayu (Malay language). It is expected for the international students to learn the Malay language, but the local students are communicatively shy due to their lack of confidence in English. The present study investigates the Malay language learning difficulties of the international students at Universiti Sultan Zainal Abidin and Universiti Malaysia Terengganu. The researcher adopted quantative analysis with a structured questionnaire as the research tool. The experiment was carried out with the IBM SPSS version tool, and hardware components such as the Intel Celeron quad core processor (2M cache, 2.0GHz), 4GHz RAM, and 500GHz HDD. One hundred and seventy (170) with eighty-five (85) of equal size between the two universities were considered as the sample size. Findings reveal that most of the respondents disagreed that it was easy to learn Malay with the traditional system that presented a frequency of 41.8%. In addition, 43.5% of the respondents believed that learning Malay with the traditional system was time-consuming. Finally, respondents disagreed that traditional learning systems are easy to read. As such, most of the respondents suggest a mobile application as a substitute to the traditional mode of Malay language learning that will enhance learning anywhere at any time, regardless of the location.