TEACHERS’ METHOD AND CHALLENGES IN TEACHING ENGLISH TO STUDENTS WITH SPECIAL NEEDS

Abstract

Students with special needs are students who experience developmental delays, and have certain medical conditions, psychiatric conditions, and/or congenital conditions. Teachers who teach students with special needs faced unusual teaching challenges compared to teachers who teach in conventional classes. Therefore, the teachers are required to be selective in using the best teaching method to be used as the students encountered special challenges that are not faced by normal students. The purpose of this study is to investigate the teachers’ teaching method and teachers’ challenges in teaching students with special needs. The study was designed in descriptive qualitative study. An in-depth interview was employed as the instrument of the study. The study concluded that the teachers teach the students with different methods following the students’ category. The total Physical Response is mostly used for teaching the ADHD students, deaf Students and mental retardation students. While for Contextual Teaching Learning method is used in teaching students with Autistic Spectrum Disorder and blindness. The study also reveals that there are several challenges that teachers encountered in teaching students with special needs, such as students’ behavior that tend to change spontaneously which following their mood, the students are difficult to be focus in learning process, and repetitive explanation that has to be done due to the shortcomings of the students in comprehending the lesson. Further study is suggested to conduct the study in experimental form, experimenting the teaching methods to find out the best method for each category of the students, and to conduct the study in more schools as this study was only conducted in one school.