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4 DISCUSSION
The finding showed that the influential factors of
linguistic awareness in improving reading skill were
phonemic and syntactic awareness, while the ones of
the visual perception awareness were discrimination
and visual memory (Bradley and Bryant, 1980). This
finding is different from the previous study that
reported that there was a positive correlation between
all aspects of both linguistic and visual perception
awareness and reading skill (Wagner et al., 1994).
These differences may occur because of the
different exposure to language use, where the
subjects’ mental ages ranged from 7 to 10 and
chronological ages ranged from 10 to 14.
Chronological ages can indicate the language
exposure, and mental ages indicate reasoning issues
and the weakness of children with intellectual
disability in reasoning. This requires further
examination.
However, there is no doubt that linguistic and
visual perception awareness influenced the whole
reading process of children with intellectual
disability. This indicates that the maturity in linguistic
and visual perception awareness becomes an integral
part of the whole reading learning process the
teachers should pay attention to. In this study,
discrimination and visual memory are proved to
improve the reading skill of children with intellectual
disabilities.
The implications of the findings are as follows:
the process of learning how to read is about get the
children’s linguistic and visual perception awareness
ready. Teaching how to read by implementing
structure analysis-synthesis process that ends with
sound reposition, by implementing mediated
learning; i.e., learning how to read is carried out using
a scaffolding technique, the learning process should
be in the children’s zone of proximal development
(Eren, 2009).
5 CONCLUSIONS
Early reading teaching based on linguistic and visual
perception awareness was significantly effective in
improving the reading skill of children with
intellectual disabilities. This is evident in the increase
in their reading ability to read sentences that they had
never been taught before.
The positive effect was that the reading skill
acquisition was faster, the changes in the attitudes and
beliefs of teachers to change the process of reading
teaching approach. This approach can be an
alternative to overcome learning difficulties of the
children with intellectual disability.
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