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Volume 1: At Home

Volume 1 of this Guide is written specially for parents to help you to know how to help your child to listen and talk, and to have fun doing it. Learning to listen and talk has already been done by thousands of young people, many with very profound deafness. With your help and the Natural Aural Approach, your child can do it too!

The Natural Aural Approach is an effective way of bringing up deaf children of all degrees of deafness so that they can talk, join in with family life, go to school with their brothers, sisters and friends and make their way in the world as independent adults.

Using the Approach does not take away their deafness, but it enables it to be managed and gives the deaf young person the chance to choose how they live their life.

Within this approach, the best of modern technology should be used to enable the deaf child to hear as well as is possible. For the great majority of children, effective and useful (but not normal) hearing can be achieved from the use of individual hearing aids. For some, who cannot benefit from ordinary hearing aids, a cochlear implant may be necessary.

There are a very small number of children who may not succeed in learning to listen. These children may need to learn by using sign language. We believe however that all children should have the chance of learning to listen before any decision on the use of sign language is made.

People using this approach recognises that deaf children can learn to listen and talk in the same way as other children - in a natural way in the course of everyday life. Deaf children with good hearing aids do not have to be taught how to say words. They can learn through listening like other children. Learning to listen and talk may take them longer, and be slow at first. They may need more time and extra help at school, but they can achieve at similar levels to other children.

Volume 2: At School

Volume 2 of the Parents' Guide covers the period from school entrance to school leaving. It is intended to provide guidance to families on using the principles of the Natural Aural Approach to enable hearing-impaired children to progress according to their potential within the education system. It is best read in conjunction with Volume 1, which contains a large body of information about hearing-impairment and the Natural Aural Approach.

The Natural Aural Approach is essentially a set of principles that guide teachers and parents towards creating good quality opportunities to learn for hearing-impaired children and young people. The Approach seeks to create the same kind and quality of learning experience which hearing young people enjoy and benefit from.

This particularly applies to the core issue of spoken language. The manner in which normally hearing children throughout the world effortlessly acquire their mother tongue is our model. It does not depend on teaching, lessons, classrooms, therapy, stress or anxiety. It occurs through the natural daily experiences of ordinary people living their lives - through the talk involved in growing, learning and living together. Deafness can interfere with that natural process. The Natural Aural Approach seeks to re-create it as the proven, successful route to spoken language. As spoken language users, deaf children are enabled to read, write, study and learn.

The Approach does not describe the best way to teach a child to read or to learn mathematics, science or history. There are many ways of learning all these things, each of them successfully employed in schools throughout the land. There is no 'best way' to help hearing-impaired children to read - there are principles which remind us that we read in order to understand, to learn something new, to enjoy a story, to be excited. If the principle holds, the way a child learns matters little.

Hearing-impairment can be a severe hazard to learning, requiring patience and trust, giving children time to show their potential. During that time, we are in danger of looking for shortcuts - speeding things up - a little teaching there, a hint of pressure there, a mite of anxiety and gone are the principles.

Hold on to the principles. Find time to give your child lots of pleasant, enjoyable, encouraging time to share things, find out together, talk about life, friends, and the thousands of interesting things around us, and whilst doing so watch your child grow into a mature, independent young person with a voice of their own.

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