Our experience is that some professionals look at an audiogram and decide as a result on that child's possible access to spoken language. They assume that there is a cut off point, that beyond a certain level of deafness, spoken language is not a possibility.
Though they do it with the best of intentions, of helping parents come to a, in their view, realistic understanding of their child's future, they are frequently out of touch with what is now possible.
Their expertise is in their medical specialism, not current hearing aid technology, childhood language acquisition, acoustic phonetics, or any of the other disciplines on which the Natural Aural Approach draws.
We know of many parents (for example, see Ann's tale) whose deaf children are now chattering away (hear Ann's son, Richard ) who were told by such professionals that their child would never talk.
Speech spoken at a normal speed is full of rhythm and intonation. We now know that it is the rhythm and intonation that children find easiest to hear and learn. So, groups of words, e.g. 'look at that', are easier to hear than single words, e.g. 'look', and long words e.g. 'elephant' are easier to hear than short words, e.g. 'cat'.
We now know that deaf children can learn well through listening with good quality hearing aids or cochlear implants. To help children develop good listening, we need to make listening a part of everyday life. Many children with the right aids don't need to use their eyes to know what is being said - we can even talk to them when they are not looking.
Once children know something about sound and language, lipreading can be a very useful extra aid when things are difficult - when there is a lot of background noise, for example, which is when we all use it. The children themselves will tell you when they need to see you.
Research into how children learn to talk has shown us that teaching children words and sentences is not the best way - it leaves children confused about how to use words and muddles their sentences.
Children learn words and language themselves, as they listen to and talk to the people in their lives. They find they need words and sentences to say what's in their minds. It's as natural as learning to walk, once you can hear, even if you don't hear exactly the same as other people.
It takes a normally hearing child about a year to produce her first word - a year of listening. We should expect a deaf child to need at least a year of listening through the aids before she starts to talk.
During that year of listening, children play with their voices, learn to get attention and learn to recognise a few regularly used sayings, 'Daddy's coming', Where's teddy?', 'bath-time'.
Children learn first the words which are most important to them, not the ones which we think are easy, or the ones they hear most often. Their first words are likely to be words like 'more', 'no', 'gone', 'down', because these words make something happen in their lives.
Because children can hear themselves, they can match their speech to what they hear others say. Their speech develops natural rhythms and intonation patterns and is usually quite easy to understand and becomes clearer as they develop - the more they talk, the better they become.
Children don't need to be taught to speak. Expecting correct pronunciation before they are speaking fluently can interfere with the natural sound of their speech. It can also make them feel self-conscious about talking. Children need to enjoy talking without worrying about how its said. If you don't understand them, be patient, they will try again.
Running speech is a continuous stream of constantly changing patterns of sound. These patterns are very subtle and fleeting. When signing is constantly used at the same time as speech, these subtle patterns are changed, often quite radically. This makes it much more difficult, if not impossible, for the deaf child to "tune-in" to the patterns that are inherent in normal speech, since sign distorts them.
It is virtually impossible for sign to be used in complete synchrony with speech. It is very difficult to pay attention to two sensory inputs at the same time particularly when one claims so much more attention than the other
What does not work for anyone, parents or children, are eclectic compromises which result in the child having no access at all to a functional language. There are some authorities who suggest that a deaf pre-school child who is being encouraged to talk at home should attend a signing nursery "just in case". This sort of halfway house just serves to confuse and delay the child's development.
But natural gesture is an important part of getting to know what talk is about.
The facial expressions and gestures which people use every day, play an important part in children learning to make sense of the sounds they hear. They help children to know what sounds mean and give important clues about how people think. It is important that children benefit from their use.
Some experienced mothers with both hearing and deaf children will tell you that their deaf children were no more frustrated as toddlers than their hearing children. All young children experience periods of frustration.
There is also no evidence to suggest that deaf children who use sign are any less subject to bouts of frustration than children who are being brought up using an auditory oral approach.
There are some suggestions about how to help dealing with difficult behaviour in Just like every other child
Sign language is the natural language for deaf children only when it is the natural language of the home, i.e. where it is used for daily communication between family members. Otherwise it is no more natural than any other language.
Since most deaf parents have hearing children (about 85%), very, very few severely or profoundly deaf children are born each year into homes where sign language is the natural language. Probably no more than 20 - 25 children such children per year.
Sign language, which uses movement and vision to convey meaning is organised in a way which is fundamentally different to spoken languages. It is difficult for hearing people, whose language developed through listening, to fully master sign language, unless they were exposed to it as a young child - hearing children of sign using deaf parents for example. Deaf children would need to be surrounded at an early age by fluent sign language users if they were to develop vision and movement as the basis of their language. The parents and family of a deaf child are not normally fluent sign language users, and are unlikely to become so during the early years that are vital to language acquisition.
There is no evidence for this. It seems likely that deaf children will be better adjusted if they are able to mix naturally with their family and community and fulfil their educational potential. This makes it more likely that children educated through spoken language will become well adjusted.
All of the research has focused on sign language users where there is considerable cause for concern because of the difficulty the NHS has in meeting their needs.
This is an issue of parental choice for their children. The absence of spoken language in the home makes it more difficult for such children to learn to listen and talk but it remains a feasible alternative. In order to achieve spoken language these children need to receive their education in a spoken language environment not involving the use of sign and other family and friends need to provide as much spoken language for the child in the home as possible.
