Salila Prasidya Hidayati and Fahri
The Effect Of Neurological Impress Method (N.I.M) On Reading Ability Of English Text
On Dyslexic Students 551
Teaching reading might need many procedures and techniques because it requires cognitive
and metacognitive skills by the teacher. Despite this fact, teaching reading also needs a lot
of preparation before and after the process. Reading is a process to recognize words and
sentences, drawing a new assumption about the text. That is why some teachers may face
difficulties in teaching reading in dyslexic students’ classrooms especially teaching English
text. Then the teacher should teach the ways the students can comprehend easily about the
text, so students could get the meaning without dealing with misinterpretation in the
classroom
Reading is interpreting and comprehending text for specific readers’ purposes
(Cline, Johnstone, & King, 2006). For the readers, reading is figuring out the meaning of
the text by analyzing the written text. On the other hand, some students might think that
there is a big challenge in learning reading as a foreign language (Johns & Davies, 1983).
According to Tighe & Schatschneider (2016), three main components that must be
mastered when the students want to learn reading is phonemic awareness, reading fluency,
and reading comprehension. In reading, decoding the words is the key to increase the
reading ability for students to understand what they read (Rasinski, 2004). To comprehend
the English text as a foreign language, readers have to implement a constructive process to
establish a meaningful text. It can be difficult for the students that have difficulty in
differentiating the phoneme and the letter.
Reading difficulties are commonly said as the problem in reading something,
whether it comes before, while, or after reading. Based on Harris (1971), difficulty in
comprehending the alphabet and recognized the unfamiliar words are the problems faced
by the learners when they are reading. These two problems generally make the reading
error, affecting the learners’ phonemic awareness, reading fluency, and reading
comprehension.
The difficulty in interpreting the written text into speech sound such as word
recognition, spelling, and phonological transcription called dyslexia (Tunmer & Greaney,
2010). Fortunately, these problems can influence the students’ vocabulary, comprehend
complex sentences, and interfere in understanding difficult material in the future.
According to the World Federation of Neurology, G. Hynd & C. Hynd, 1984, dyslexia is
the condition that the sufferers sustain central nervous system dysfunction; it might affect
their brain to identify the words.
According to Stothard & Hulme (1992) explain that dyslexic students are the
students that have trouble in reading in which they cannot decide the speech sound with the
letter of the words. Dyslexic students also generally remove the words when they are
spelling in reading, so they have phonological awareness (Bruck, 1992). In short, dyslexic
students is the students that have weaknesses in reading ability, and it can affect their
phonemic awareness, reading fluency, and reading comprehension. On the other hand,
dyslexic students also have to build a big effort to overcome their weaknesses in reading
ability because it can influence their performance in school. So, for overcoming the
problems, the researcher applied the neurological impress method.
The neurological impress method is the method that the students can imitate their
teacher in the way of intonation, punctuation accuracy, and pronunciation of the words
correctly in reading; this theory was extended by Heckelman in 1966 (Grätzel, 1977). It
becomes the best procedure to increase dyslexic students’ reading ability through a reading
guideline, then the neurological impress method applied in four stages. First, the teacher
sits beside the students to make sure the students hear the teacher’s voice (Arnold, 1972;
Flood, Lapp, & Fisher, 2005). Next, the teacher decides the book to read that suitable for
the level of the students and guides them to become comfortable reading that book.