The Continuance of Cultural Heritage among East Coast Community in Children Folklores

Folklore is a literary genre serves as cultural expressions. The cultural elements include the rules, norms, beliefs and lifestyles of the community and still practice from generation to the next generation through learning and hereditary. Nevertheless, cultural values have been eroded due to the development and advances in technology and education. However, there is still perception that sticking to many aspects of tradition may hamper progress. This notion affects the folklore ‘s position gravely. Even so, the culture will not be discarded or forgotten as it contained the history of civilization as moral guide for the future. Therefore, two objectives in this review, that is to identify and analyze the continuity of cultural elements that still exist among the Malay community through children folk tales. This analysis refers solely to a collection of 366 Malaysian Folklore collected by Aripin Said and Othman Puteh with Malay folklores from East coast of Peninsular Malaysia as the main focus. From observations made, three elements of the dominant culture can be divided into beliefs, medicine and expressive culture. These elements are still held and practiced by the East Coast Community because it has the value of education and the value of art that represent themselves. In addition, the cultural elements within children folklores enable to open the minds of the younger generation especially children to think in a more critical and creative ways.