Paper Title
Reading Skills Among Special Remedial Children

Abstract
This paper discusses the Malay language learning among special remedial children focussing on the basic skills of reading. The term special remedial children referred to a group of children who doing poorly in school, but not eligible for special education. In the context of education in Malaysia, these children are often labeled as the special remedial children. According to the National Society for the Study of Education, these children usually find the traditional type of school program too difficult to handle without some modifications of the program to adjust requirements to their normal capacity of achievement. The learning problem is caused by the automatic promotion system used in the school system in Malaysia. Through this system, children who have not mastered basic skills 3R (Reading, Writing, Arithmetics) will move to the next grade automatically every year. Hence, this situation caused the child to be left behind as the new syllabus will be introduced in the following year. The researchers used the Searchlights (Searchlight Model of Reading) to develop a basic reading kit for the special remedial children which focuses on four main elements, namely the recognition of letters and graphics, phonics, context, and Malay grammar. The teaching modules are divided into four learning objectives based on Bloom's Taxonomy (1956). As for this paper, the discussion will focuses only on letter recognition and graphics only. Findings show that the ability to recognize the letters and how to associate letters with graphic symbols must be achieved prior to the understanding of the concept of letters. Preparation of teaching materials should be in accordance with the concept of easy to difficult and from the concrete to the abstract. The researchers concluded that the need for appropriate teaching aids for special remedial children, is very important to help them with learning difficulties. Index Terms- children, Malay language, reading skills, special remedial learners