Exploring the issues and challenges of primary school student's mastery of Jawi

Abstract

Mastery in Jawi skills is significant for every primary school. This study aims to identify the extent in which the primary school students have acquired the Jawi skills and factors that influence them. The objective of this study is to examine student’s ability to recognize single Jawi letters, to connect single Jawi letters in forming a full word in Jawi, to write words which are in Jawi texts using Romans texts and vice versa. The objective of this study is also to examine to what extent the following factors provide challenges to primary school students in Jawi skills acquisition from the perspective of awareness, interest, motivation, teaching, learning processes and to examine significant differences among students of different genders in the acquisition of Jawi skills. Population of this study comprised of all of Year 6 primary school students in ZonPen2 about 766 students. The sampling subjects of this study consists of 254 year 6 primary school students in ZonPen2 (Zon Pendidikan 2). The subjects are selected randomly among male and female respondents from each school. An action research design was used in this study. In order to observe the objective, researchers used analysis and questionnaire. The results showed that 100 % year six students in Bachok can mastery in recognize jawi letters, 70 % students can connect some letters of Jawi to become a word, 40 % students can converting roman simple sentences to Jawi simple sentences and 45 % students can convert jawi writing text to Roman writing text. The result of this research also shows the challenges faced by the years six students in mastery Jawi skills from the perspective of the interest; most pupils are interested in learning Jawi subject, but resources in Jawi writing are not much and less encourage from book publication. From the perspectives of awareness, majority pupils strongly have awareness about significant of Jawi Subject. From perspectives of motivation, majority pupils have strongly agreed that motivation is one of the factors to make pupils success in Jawi Subject. And from the perspectives of teaching and learning process majority pupils have strongly agree that method of teaching and learning is one of the factors to make pupils success in Jawi Subject. Analysis of the data revealed that there are Significant difference among students of different genders in the acquisition of Jawi skills from the perspective of the Interest, Awareness, Motivation and Teaching and learning process, the mean score for interest level for female (M = 3.21, SD = 0.39) is higher than that of the male (M = 2.62, SD = 0.72).