Exploring English language teacher’s challenge in teaching students with Hearing Impairment: A case study in a special school in East Java, Indonesia

Hearing-impaired students get the same right to learn English well as their hearing peers. However, not every English teacher knows how to deliver English effectively to hearing-impaired students. Therefore, this research aims to discuss teachers’ challenges in teaching English to hearing-impaired students and find out the teacher’s strategies to deal with the challenges. Qualitative method and case study design are used in this research. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and two meetings of nonparticipant observations. The participant was an English teacher in a special senior high school for hearing-impaired students in Blitar, East Java. This research exposes these eight challenges: 1) students could not pronounce English well; 2) difficulty in teaching speaking and reading skills; 3) students could not choose the correct term from the dictionary; 4) students are hard to understand English tenses; 5) students misunderstand teacher’s instructions; 6) students forget English materials quickly; 7) teacher struggles in introducing new English materials; and 8) teacher hard to get good quality video with Bahasa Indonesia subtitle. Besides the challenges, this research also shows the strategies to solve the problems: 1) teacher uses IPA to show the pronunciation of English vocabulary, 2) teacher faces the students and pronounce the vocabulary with clear articulation; 3) teacher approaches students’ seat and guides them; 4) teacher decides to use the regular verb to teach past tense; 5) teacher goes to students’ seat and repeat the instructions; 6) teacher has to repeat the same materials; 7) teacher connects the previous material with the new materials; and 8) teacher has to provide the subtitle on the board or laptop. In conclusion, this research discovers eight challenges and strategies to teach English to hearing-impaired students. The results of this research are to provide an overview for English teachers who are or will teach hearing-impaired students. Along with the challenges, strategies are also provided to help English teachers teach hearing-impaired students. However, the result could not generalize nor applied in every situation, as there are factors that influenced the challenges and strategies. This research expects the government to include sign language in the curriculum for hearing people as this research realized that learning how to sign language or speech reading is quite necessary to help the hearing-impaired people comfortably live and learn in this hearing society