The enhancement of reading ability of students with intellectual disability through strengthening their perceptions and images

Abstract

This paper discusses the reading difficulties of intellectually disabled students by strengthening their perception and image by providing teaching materials for reading. Teaching materials are made in such a way with the assumption that the material in teaching materials has been known by students before. Teaching materials are made in such a way in the form of capital letters considering that some intellectual disability students belong to the dyslexia group. Teaching materials are made using attractive colors and good paper so that the printout attracts the attention of students. Strengthening perceptions and images is done by providing real objects in the form of interesting objects or puzzle images, and showing the direct object if the object being taught is found directly around the class. Finally, students are asked to take a capital letter puzzle that matches the object being taught This research is experimental research by first making a product to be experimented on. The result shows improvement in the reading ability of students, although problems of implementation are still found because their learning cultures are different. After the experimentation process, the teaching materials were perfected according to the input found by the teacher in the field, Teaching materials are added to the existing lowercase and capital letters and given a separator between letters because students are used to being taught using letter by letter. The conclusion from this experiment is that strengthening perceptions and images of a student with an intellectual disability can improve their reading ability.