The Effectiveness of Picture Mnemonics for Teaching Basic English Communication for Students with an Intellectual Disability

Abstract

This present study aims to find out whether or not there is a significant difference between the basicEnglish communication ability of the eighth grade students with an intellectual disability before and after being taught by using picture mnemonics.Picture mnemonics is one of the types of visual mnemonic classification which makes use of pictures or visualizations to create an association with the target concepts (e.g., symbolic, pictographic). This research is quasi experiment with one group pretest and posttest design. Based on the objective of the research, the instrument used was achievement test. The test consists of 5 items for speaking and 5 items for writing which were colorful with 16 font size in order to be interesting and readable for the special students.The participants involved in this study were 9 students with an intellectual disability of the eighth grade secondary Special School with 50-65 IQ. The results of this study revealed that there is statistically significant different between the students with an intellectual disability’ basic English communication ability before and after being taught by using picture mnemonics. It can be seen from the results of Wilcoxon test that indicates that the p-value is 0.007. Because the p-value is lower than the significance value (α) 0.05,, that is the p-the p-value is 0.007 which is lower than the significance value (α) 0.05. Considering the benefits of that picture mnemonics which can help students with an intellectual disability remember better it is suggested that this mnemonics should be used by the teacher when teaching English, especially for special students.