Only Malay respondents were used as it was easier and more reliable to define the
status of English as a L2 in Malay homes, for in non-Malay homes English was either
the L1, L2, L3 or L4 depending on the relative positions of their home languages and
Bahasa Malaysia. Malay students were also used as the identification of
communication strategies in the present study involved a comparison of the
respondents’ L1 and L2 utterances and the researcher is a bilingual in both these
languages.