Effects of Hearing Loss on Children

¶ … hearing loss in Children

It is well within our knowledge that hearing is vital to speech as well as language growth, communication, along with education. Those children who suffer from listening complexity owing to hearing loss or acoustic dispensation tribulations have persistently been under acknowledged as well as underserved population. It is clear that when a hearing problem occurs in the child during his early stage, it tend to develop more and more within the child. It is therefore advisable that the moment you realize that a child has such complication the better you start taking care of it to lessen the impact. It has always been easier said than done to categorize children with this complication of meek hearing loss minus taking the children through hearing screening programmed. This is for the reason that they more often than not contain whichever precise substantial indications or findings. On the other hand, there are some behaviors that can make one suspect hearing loss in a child; these behaviors are like insensitivity, recurrent pardons, out of place answers as well as bewilderment of comparable resonances terms may perhaps point out hearing loss. There can also be extremely loud talks or extremely soft talk, distortion of speech among others (J. Dood-Murphy, N. Mamlin, 2002). Getting to effects of the complication, we find a number of effects that are related to hearing loss in children as;

I. It brings about the delay in the receptive growth as well as communication skills both in speech and language.

II. Reduction in academic performance as a result of leaning difficulties brought about by language shortfall.

III. Social isolation as well as poor one's concept which is contributed to by communication difficulties.

IV. Vocal choice may also be registered.

Starting with vocabulary, we find that it is difficult for vocabulary to grow in such children. These children get it rough to learn words like before, after, equal to among others and get it easy when leaning words like cat, jump five etc. There is also aspect of not catching up with intervention among the affected children as there is a growing gap between vocabulary of children with hearing less as they continue growing. Also there seem to arose the difficulty of differentiating or understanding words with more than one meaning. To sentence structuring we find that those children with hearing loss problem tend to construct very simply and short sentences as compared to those who are not having the problem. This extends even to writing as they cannot write long and difficult sentences. Hearing of words that ends with -- s or -- ed proves to be a problem to this children which results to misuse of words including wrong sentence formation or construction. ( F.H. Bess, J. Dodd-Murphy, R.A. Parker, 1998 )

When it comes to speaking these children with hearing loss hardly hear quite speech sounds like those with & #8230;.s,…..sh….t… and even k and many a time they tend to omit them in their speech making it difficult to understand what they are saying. There is also a problem of them not getting hearing their own voices due to poor inflection and also poor speaking rate. On academic achievement this children experience challenges in all directions more so in reading as well as arithmetical concepts. Unless appropriate action or measure is put in place children with mild to reasonable hearing losses tend to get lower grades as compared to their counterparts with normal hearing. As these children grow, the academic achievement gap between them and their counterparts who have normal hearing widens as they continue with their schooling. It is good to note that the achievement level varies depending on the attention given by the guardian or parent both in quality and quantity. Social wise, children with hearing loss tend to feel isolated when their age mates with normal hearing keep away from them hence making them lonely and unhappy. This comes as a result of communication brake down between the ones with hearing loss and the ones with normal hearing. It is said to be common in children with a mild hearing loss compared to those with severe to insightful loss.

After looking at the effects that children with hearing loss under go, it is important to try and see how the effects can be encountered and it's here where the teacher's role comes in. First as a teacher attending to this children you must make sure that every child within your care and has this complication gets to follow the class proceedings and for this to be achieved a number of things has to be in place.

I. Conducive learning environment for the children with hearing loss

II. An extra care and attention should be accorded to these children in that while teaching them you should be facing them, also come up with the way in which these children can communicate to you if they are not following whatever you are doing or telling them. A perceptive teacher once came up with the proposal of what she called "secret sign" that she instructed her student to use when not following the classroom discussion. Such kind of emphasis have worked well in building children's understanding.

III. The teacher should try and create a good rapport with these kids making them more open to the teacher.

From the interview and the situation in most schools it is without no doubt that teachers always do their best to delivering service to these kids. If performance was gauged, we found out that a good number of this kids could pronounce a number of difficult words which tend to be a problem to many of them. And with this only some polishing should be done as we will see below.

It is very obvious that every parent would want to give his child the best foundation to build his or her life on and the teachers also have done their best in assisting this children only that due to development and enhancement in technology, teachers need to double their efforts and make sure that all is in place to encounter the development. Among the areas that need adjustment are.

Education where an Educational Audiologist who is to take care of children hearing in the classroom and should also train ordinary teachers and other members of staff on hearing loss should be introduced because in most schools this was a challenge. On concentration, a teaching Assistant who assists in performing a range of tasks including assisting the children stay side by side of classroom activities is to be introduced as in most schools only had one general teacher for all the purposes. And lastly on the children's speech which seems as the most challenging sector for this kids, a speech Language Pathologist is needed as he will be in a position to offer speech service to those children with cochlear at some spot in their school life. This position comes with the accountability of evaluating as well as growing an intercession arrangement, and spoken language ability. There is also a need for the interpreter as many children with this complication use spoken language and nearly half of them tend to use full communication in school hence a need for the interpreter.