Improving mild intellectual disabled students reading and understanding abilities through the method of reading texts with repetitions and reading colored texts: An action research

The purpose of this study is to improve mild intellectual disabled students reading and understanding skills through the method reading texts with repetitions and colored texts. This study was conducted by using action research method which is one of the qualitative research methods. The participants of this research are 2 mild intellectual disabled students that were chosen using convenience sampling from the school where the researcher working. The data collection instruments for this action research are "Sound, Syllable, Word, Sentence, and Paragraph Scale" (Obalar, 2009) and Reading Ability Test (Obalar, 2009). A stopwatch was used to record the time spent by students while reading the texts. Qualitative data such as expert opinions, observation forms, voice and video records, that was collected during this research was analyzed using content analysis. Frequency tables and graphs generated from the data interpreted by the researcher. The findings suggest that the method of reading texts with repetitions help mild intellectual disabled students to improve their reading and understanding abilities and improve their reading speed. Moreover, the method of reading texts with colored texts also has the similar effects with slightly different outcomes. Keywords: Intellectual disability or mentally retarded students, reading, special education, reading with colored texts, reading with repetitions