Students' Responses to The Types of Questions Used in Teaching English for Mentally Retarded Students: A Study at SLB Bina Putra

Abstract

Parents who have a mentally retarded child hoped that they could give the best education to their children. In fact, mentally retarded students suffer from their deficiencies in learning which have a poor memory and short attention span. They prefer to imitate what people do or say as their ways in learning. Questioning appears as one of the ways of the teacher that can be used to guide mentally retarded students in learning especially English.This study aimed to find out the types of questions frequently used in teaching English for mentally retarded students at Bina Putra and also focused on the students' responses toward those types of questions. The research participant was an English teacher at SLB Bina Putra, Salatiga. The data were collected using a nonparticipant observation and an interview. The results of this study were five types of questions frequently used by the teacher such as recall questions, probing questions, closed questions, convergent questions, and display questions. The result showed that the purposes of using those types of questions were to test students' previous knowledge, recall and recognize something. Besides, the responses from students were also presented in this study which were positive responses such as they were able to answer quickly and they motivated to answer the questions, then no responses such as the students preferred to be silent and they preferred to repeat teacher's utterances.