| الملخص: | From the time of fertilisation, a human baby grows and develops in a complex manner.
In the uterus, a baby feels, hears, sees, tastes, learns, remembers and communicates with
his/ her mother (Stoppard, 1996). Subsequently, the baby will undergo several
milestones in his/ her life. The communication ‘deficits’ of children with autism and
minimal or no speech have been the main focus of much research in the past especially
in the western countries (Potter & Whittaker, 2001; Collard and HubPages pp : 75). In
Malaysia, Kow (2000) has done a research on child language entitled ‘Strategies
employed by pre-school children in communicating meaning’. In order to establish a 2-
way communication, this study will look into how a five-year old bilingual child gets
his meanings across in various settings and thus to find out what the communication
strategies are. A pilot study was carried out and it showed that the participant of this
study invented new creative communication strategies namely ‘spelling’ and ‘singing’
in order to get his meanings across. In this study, data will be collected through close
participant observation by using qualitative approach. As the researcher is also a
member of the study, focus is given to the child in the home setting and occasionally
outside the home setting. The period of observation took up seven months. Data were
collected from June 2009 until December 2009. The participant of this study was given
the opportunity to draw and colour drawings of his kindergarten’s peers and to later
describe them. Data were collected using pen and paper method, video-camcorder and
tape recording. Data were then transcribed using adapted ‘Jeffersonian Transcript
Notation’. All utterances that contained non-English words were translated. At the
beginning of data collection, JH was only four years old. At present, he is five years
old. He converses in Hokkien and English. He is the only child in a middle class
family. Both parents speak Hokkien and English but use only English with him. He
attends an English medium kindergarten and is cared for by his maternal grandaunt who speaks Hokkien with him. The findings of this study can benefit teachers, writers for
educational television programmes and curriculum designers for they can incorporate
better and more effective teaching materials to facilitate learning so that bilingual
children can learn to be more confident when they employ spelling and singing
communication strategies to communicate with other people. There are several
limitations in this study. This is just one case study hence the data collected might not
be sufficient and is not meant to be representative of a justified research on the
communication strategies adopted by a five-year old simultaneous bilingual child in
general. Furthermore, due to the uniqueness of every human being, even for identical
twins, a bigger collection of data at random from various simultaneous bilingual
children in both genders, of Chinese or any other races definitely can contribute to more
accurate and generalized findings.
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