Teacher's strategies in teaching english for deaf students: a case study at SMP Luar biasa of Karya Mulia Foundation

Deafness is a condition where a person is unable to hear partly or completely. Deaf people have different way on how to communicate with others, including the way they learn. Teachers need to have special ways to teach them in order to achieve the teaching and learning goals. This research aimed to identify teachers’ strategies in teaching English for deaf students and the challenges which the teacher faced in classroom practices by conducting a case study in SMP Karya Mulia (special school for deaf students). To answer the issue, this study interviewed an English teacher about his strategies in teaching and found the challenges during classroom practices. To obtain comprehensive data, this study also did classroom observations. The research showed that teacher tended to focus the teaching on vocabulary instead of other skills, to teach simple conversation, to give appropriate treatment based on students’ ability, to let students to have freedom in developing their ability in English, to use phonetic transcriptions as guidance in pronouncing the words, to use different media, and to speak slowly and clearly when using sign language. The teacher’s challenges in teaching deaf students was from students’ innate ability such as short memory, unstable emotional, different hearing levels. These students’ personal weaknesses may encourage teachers to find ways on how to make students understand the materials. The finding of this study highlights that teaching deaf students need extra efforts and passion to make them get into the learning, and the strategies found in this study can be used other EFL teachers to teach deaf students.