by Patrick Pillai, education specialist, SESA
In classrooms of hearing children, teachers may be more likely to encounter children with mild to moderate hearing loss than those who are profoundly deaf. Accommodation is critical if these children are to achieve their maximum success.
It is no secret that hearing loss impacts the process of spoken language acquisition. In fact, spoken language and its visual presentation in reading and writing are often seen as the main ingredient for classroom success.
When hard-of-hearing children are in classes of hearing students, ways must be discovered to support them. This requires understanding what it means to be hard-of-hearing.
Counter The "Filter Effect"
Being hard-of-hearing means a lot more than not being able to hear. Flexer (1995) describes the "acoustic filter effect" of hearing loss as distorting, smearing, or eliminating incoming sounds. Hearing aids do not have the corrective feature of glasses. They address primarily one aspect of sound—its volume—and their primary feature is mostly amplification.
When other sound is present, the speech signal must compete and sometimes loses out to background noise. Thus hard-of-hearing children may experience difficulty with listening, especially in noisy classroom settings. Hearing teachers may learn something of the hard-of-hearing student’s experience by placing a stethoscope on a student’s ear mold when it is attached to the hearing aid. The stethoscope, available at hearing aid centers and in audiologists’ offices, provides first-hand experience of the amplification of classroom sounds.
Needless to say, teachers should keep the noise level in classrooms as low as possible to provide the best opportunity for the student to access important information in the classroom.
Back to top
Understanding The Misunderstanding
Many hard-of-hearing students feel that they can successfully depend on their auditory input, but they often misinterpret what has been said. For example, a student with a high frequency hearing loss may process the word "surround" as "round." The student then responds correctly in the context of his understanding—but inappropriately in the context of the understanding of the rest of the students or that of the teacher.
Unfortunately, lack of understanding may draw laughter from peers or scolding from the teacher. But the fault is not intellectual or intentional; it is simply a consequence of hearing loss.
Guard Against Presumption
The strain of decoding may lead students to "tune out" from classroom discussions. For hard-of-hearing children, making sense of what is being said may be likened to piecing together information from reading a paper that has stains covering parts of the words, or listening to the intermittent signal of a radio on the perimeter of the broadcast range.
Hard-of-hearing students do hear sounds, but decoding for intelligibility involves an active process that warrants conscious attending. This process is highly dependent on context, vocabulary, and inferential experience.
Sometimes the "good verbal skills" of hard-of-hearing students fool teachers into believing that students are listening selectively in class. Responses that sometimes seem "off the wall" may be a direct result of an attempt to "guess the right answer" from inadequate auditory input.
Give The Student Time
Another important factor is the auditory processing time lag. When many teachers present materials in class, they use the easiest medium (talking). With no visuals or gestures, the student is forced to rely exclusively on lipreading to grasp the information. Most studies cite 25% as the amount of information readily gleaned by lipreading. This means hard-of-hearing students may be missing 75% of what is being communicated. Is it any wonder that they sometimes question what is to be done seconds after the teacher concludes giving instructions?
The time lag of auditory processing also fuels the belief of some teachers that their students are deliberately not paying attention. "He does not stay focused long enough to listen to the complete instruction," one teacher complains. "While I am still talking he starts looking at his book or at the other kids," says another teacher.
Students often have a different—and equally valid—perspective. One twelve-year-old Alaskan hard-of-hearing student in a mainstream setting explained: "When the teacher explains something he talks for a long time. After listening to one or two sentences, I start to experience difficulty following what he is saying. I know that he wants us to do something from the text so I try to read the instructions in the book or look around to see if any of the other kids understand what he is saying."
Monitor Placement
Whether in a center school for deaf students or in a mainstream classroom, teachers encounter children whose placement has already been determined. It is important to continue monitoring the placement to make sure that it is appropriate. If you feel the hard-of-hearing child in your class is not receiving enough verbal input to succeed in an auditory-learning situation, consider consulting parents and administrators and discussing other appropriate placements.
It is tragic when teacher and students find themselves separated not only by a wall of silence, but by a wall of naturally inferred but inaccurate beliefs. As teachers, we are the ones who bear first responsibility. We must examine our beliefs first and make sure that we are aware of the needs of hard-of-hearing students.
Reprinted courtesy of Perspectives in Education and Deafness, Pre-College National Mission Programs, Gallaudet University
