ABSTRACT

The innovative reading programme is in demand and serves as the primary national literacy initiative, aiming to instil a reading culture. The Reading Seed Programme (RSP) was developed in-house by PUSTAKA Negeri Sarawak as a literacy intervention programme for early childhood, specifically targeting toddlers aged 0-3 years. The process is vital to helping children learn to read from a young age and eventually empower them to be independent readers for life. Particularly, the objectives of RSP are to promote reading habits by getting parents to read to their children, strengthen a child’s vocabulary, and develop their confidence, especially in reading. This study created a scale (known as the Reading Seed Programme Effectiveness Scale, or RSPes) to gauge the RSP's feasibility and measure how effectively it achieved its objective of fostering toddlers' early childhood literacy development. Exploratory factor analysis was utilised to assess the scale's criterion validity (both construct and content), followed by assessments of the measure's reliability and validity. The results demonstrated that the reading habits, the child’s vocabulary ability, and the RSP measures stand as multidimensional constructs. The parents’ engagement and confidence development remained as unidimensional constructs as conceptualised. Nonetheless, the findings of this study demonstrate that the RSPes is valid and reliable for empirical research on the specified constructs.

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