Reformasi Ejaan Jawi untuk Literasi dan Revitalisasi Jawi: Satu Kertas Konsep.

As stated in the National Language Acts, Jawi, or the Arabic script of Malay, is an alternative writing for the Malay language. Therefore, speakers of the Malay language are expected to be able to read Jawi fluently. Unfortunately, this is not the case; even those who are able to read the Qu’ran fluently, are not able to read the Jawi script fluently despite the fact that both are written in the Arabic script. Past studies have shown that many languages of the world have gone through spelling reformation, among others, to increase the literacy rate among their speech communities, and to revitalize the writing system. Thus, this conceptual paper proposes the necessary steps towards reforming the existing Jawi script. This should begin with conducting a scientific study to support previous studies that suggest that the current Jawi spelling system is complex, causing more and more speakers of the Malay avoiding to use it. This article proposes the use of a psychological-based language-processing software and the eye tracking machine to quantitatively analyse the reading process through reaction times and reading duration, fixation count, fixation duration, and visit counts. The findings can then be supported qualitatively through readers’ gaze plot dan heat maps along with verbal data obtained from retrospective interviews conducted on the participants. If data from both analyses confirm that the current Jawi spelling system results in difficulty in reading Jawi, this article proposes a spelling reformation to take place – using the spelling reformation approaches used not only by other languages of the world, but also those that were used in the reformation of previous and the current Jawi spelling system. Spelling reformation is an ongoing process and is vital not only to improve the literacy rate among speakers of particular languages, but also to revitalise their writing systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]