I have a 5 year old boy with a severe hearing loss that just moved into my system. He can access some speech sounds through hearing aids plus he utilizes visual cues such as lipreading. He knows only a couple of letter names and came to me not even being able to write his first name correctly.
I do not think his language level is where it needs to be to begin formal reading instruction. His vocabulary is still quite low and it is not recommended to rush reading with a HI child who does not have at least a 5 year old vocabulary. I think I’d have to do tremendous work on PA, too. In the past, HI teachers were told to teach by sight. Sadly, this has resulted in the average deaf high school graduate in the US reading at the 3rd or 4th grade level. I know better now after studying the reading research in relation to APD and realize that even HI students must be taught similarly to dyslexic children with a MSSL approach.
Where do I begin? Should I teach him the alphabet at all? That is in the K curriculum, but I am afraid it might really confuse him. He has some understandable oral language and came to me from an oral program (no signing). I’d appreciate your input.
Janis
Re: Good Questions...Hope others join in (SLP's, too)
Thanks, Susan. I was actually thinking I might need some LiPS for him due to the fact that he will not be able to hear all the sounds. He’ll have to have the oral-motor kinesthetic portion, I suspect. I think working on PA will be hard with him. Ask her about that, too, if you don’t mind. My SLP has not had LiPS and has not had severe oral HI kids before, so I can’t get much help there! (She’s great and is going to auditory/verbal training workshops with me, though).
Janis
ideas
I never worked with a HI child, but did work with one who had a genetic disorder that caused severe language problems.
Generally, what I do is teach both name and sound of letter together. It takes a little longer at first but pays off big time a couple of months down the road when you don’t have to unteach.
If the child otherwise shows normal intelligence, I would go ahead and teach reading, using a linguistic approach such as my traditional one or Lips or enriched PG. Then you can do a lot by working back — the kid can’t access sounds easily, so you teach new vocabulary *from* the written form. To the whole-language people this is heresy, but it works.
There are different schools of thought on this, however, I believe the letter names are important for communication(but could be taught in sign, if needed). When people spell things to you, they use letter names. I think names have a place. For reading, though, sound associations are more important.
I have a colleague in my school district who is an SLP and uses LiPS. I’m sure she’s had an HI student. I’ll ask her & maybe others will know, too.