Background:

Reading is essential for the child’s knowledge improvement and expanding their language ability. Literacy skills must be immediately mastered by students from the beginning of elementary school because these skills are directly related to the entire student learning process (Kumara, 2014). Students who are unable to read well will experience difficulties when participating learning activities. The age of 7-8 years old is a stage to establish the decoding process. Decoding is the process of translating print into speech by rapidly matching a letter to their sound and recognizing the patterns that make syllables and words. Thus, enhancing reading stimulation is very important task for child’s significant person to build well-established reading skill.

Participant       :

Participant in this study was a 7 years old boy on first grade of elementary school who did not show interest in reading activities both at school and home. He rarely finished the teacher assignments, especially for reading and writing-related tasks. At home, he only watched television and played online games on his parent’s smartphone. This child came from low-income family and his parents has little awareness about the importance of early reading stimulation.

Method                       :

This single case study involved 1 participant and used the A-B design, which aims to see if there is a change after a treatment, by measuring the state before the intervention and the situation after the intervention.  During the phase of study, the participant was asked to learn the reading-exercise book for 30 minutes every with his father or mother at home. The book was full-colour and also filled with pictures. When the participant did the learning task, he accepted 1 star-shaped token. However, if he could not accomplish it, the token could not be given. He has the right to get something he likes from his mother, such as ice cream and toys, if only he got 5 token continuously. Each token obtained will be attached to the daily schedule paper that has been displayed on the wall. This intervention was carried out for 3 weeks, from January the 8^th until January the 29^th 2018.

Result              :

The participant showed the increasing willingness in reading activities on first week. He started to succeed in reading practice for 30 minutes on the second day of intervention. Subjects get 5 tokens in the first week and 3 tokens in the second and third week. During that weeks, the parents lost their consistency in giving token system. However, the participant did not get the reward because he failed to do it continuously in 5 times.

Conclusion      :

The reading stimulation using the economic tokens on this participant was less effective. His interest on reading increased in first week and decreased in the second and third week. This is partly due to lack of parent’s consistency in implementing the token-economy systems. Besides that, the participant may felt difficult to reach the reward on first week, so it influence his motivation to do reading practice.