An Observational Report on the Impact of Natural Approach and Modelling in Teaching Children with Learning Disability

Authors: R. Vatsala Mirnaalini

Pages: 14-18

Abstract:

Susan, a 23 year old adolescent girl, diagnosed with mental retardation was under remedial teaching at Vijay Human Services, Royapettah, Chennai. Upon remedial teaching for a period of three months, the teacher observed implementing the teaching methodologies (1) Natural teaching, which is a traditional method that focuses on highlighting the importance of emotion and listening in learning especially language acquisition; (2) Modelling, an outwardly way of expressing the art of teaching by targeting the observational skills of the students in the areas of Reading, Writing and Comprehension and Arithmetic. For the assessment of identifying the academic area that requires remedial teaching, Madras Developmental Programming System (MDPS) (Jeyachandran.P & Vimala.V, 2005) was used to frame the Individualised Education Program (IEP). This was followed by remedial teaching and observational study. The observational study carried out for a period of three months at Vijay Human Services, Royapettah, Chennai was performed to identify the best strategy of teaching methodologies that best suits the subject. It was observed that the subject preferred to express her learning orally by imitating the teacher and with due practice on her own. The results were assessed after administering a small test to the subject and it was observed that Natural Teaching was effective in terms of language acquisition and product-based learning whereas Modelling was effective with respect to process based learning. The study needs more empirical evidences to conclude the observations and to identify which optimal mental age necessitates natural teaching and modelling.