The Teaching and Learning Vocabulary Process to Children with Mental Retardation of the Fifth Grade Students in SDLB-C Purwosari Kudus

Vocabulary is one of important component in learning English which is taught in elementary school. In fact, not only general elementary school taught English to their students but also elementary school for exceptional children (SDLB). One of types of Exceptional Children is mental retardation. Mental Retardation is defined as an IQ score below 70-75. Educational programs for those kind of students must be designed, implemented, and evaluated systematically so that decisions will be made that have an optimal effect on the development of each individual learner. The objective of the research in this study is to describe the process of teaching and learning English for children with mental retardation of the fifth grade students in SDLB-C Purwosari Kudus and describe the problems appear in teaching and learning process. There are four aspects focused in teaching learning process, those are curriculum, method of teaching, media, and evaluation system. The research design for this study is case study that is analyzed through qualitative methods. The data is taken from observation and interview. The writer observes teaching and learning process and does interview to the English teacher. From the finding of the research the objective is only introducing English words to the mentally retarded students in form of words. The type of syllabus used by teacher is topic-based syllabus. The material given to the children with mentally retarded in Elementary School is lighter. The method which is used by teacher in SDLB-C Purwosari Kudus is Communicative Language Teaching. The use of CLT is characterized by the involvement of the students in teaching-learning process; in here is use of question answer technique. The media are the concrete objects in surrounding. The kinds of evaluation are oral and written test. The problems appear come from the activity. They are: the different capability of the students, the students cannot developed their initiate, need long time to finish one topic, and the students still depend on the teacher to get new vocabulary. Based on the finding, the writer suggests that the teacher should be patient in teaching children with mental retardation because of their characteristic. The teacher should make good relationship with the students in order that the teaching-learning process goes smoothly. The teacher should create the situation of teaching-learning process as comfortable as possible to support the proces