Speech and language therapy aims to help all children to communicate as much as possible, and develop their speech and language skills. A speech and language therapist will work as part of a team with your child’s audiologist, along with a teacher of the hearing impaired and other professionals to help your child.
A speech and language therapist can:
1. Assess how well your child’s speech, language and communication skills are developing
2. Identify if your child is experiencing any difficulties and the reasons of it
3. Develop a plan to address those difficulties and work with you to carry out the plan
4. Give advice on your child’s progress and the next steps
5. Work with teaching staff to support language-based aspects of the curriculum.
Speech and language therapists can help with different aspects of communication, including:
1. Pragmatics – using and understanding language in social situations
2. Verbal skills – understanding and using spoken language
3. Expressive skills – getting a message across, verbally
4. Comprehension or receptive skills – understanding of spoken language
5. Voice skills – controlling volume, quality and pitch
6. Speech – pronouncing sounds and words
7. Literacy – developing an awareness of letter-sounds and language skills that are specifically related to reading, spelling and to understanding written text.
Finding the best way to communicate is an important part of better hearing and speech. Whether it is cued speech, oral communication or a mixture, communication is key for living with hearing loss.
Many children who get diagnosed when they are young, mostly lacking in many areas involving speech in the early stage of their hearing loss. However, few have mild-to-moderate hearing loss and are fortunate with their family who are educated enough to understand and decide to have oral communication with them as this is the best communication choice for any hearing impaired/HOH. Fortunately, there are good speech therapies in Delhi to help the hearing impaired.
Here are three ways a speech language therapy specialists helps a child with hearing loss:
Speech and Listening
Speech and listening skills are two of the most important skills a speech language pathologists can teach. Children would do exercises that help them learn the individual sounds of each letter in a word and how to properly pronounce the word. They also teach speech reading and visual cues to help them listen in situations that may not be ideal for a hard-of-hearing person.
Read more: What Are the Various Types Of Teaching Aids?
Reading and Writing
As children’s listening skills improve, there are more opportunities to improve their reading and writing skills. Speech and language pathology helps expand their vocabulary. Hearing impaired learns the definition of words, how they were pronounced and how they were used in a sentence. They help with gripping the writing skills stronger and help improve reading comprehension tremendously.
Self-Advocacy
If a hearing impaired goes to a “mainstream” school, they still need accommodations to keep up with the rest of the class. Although, it is a challenge to learn to advocate for themselves for the children who are shy. However, a speech pathologist helps children learn to identify situations where they might need extra help in hearing and help them as to how to tell their teachers when they may have missed any information. These were some of the benefits of speech therapy, we hope it was helpful!
Read more: Teaching Techniques For Hearing Impaired Students
Suniye is an educational NGO in Delhi, provides educational programs for hearing impairement and ensures all children from preschool to third class will certainly have the ability to go to college, play, engage, and discover new things with other kids of their age. We teach speech & language therapy to hearing impaired children. We have taught over 1,000+ hearing impaired students over the last 25 years.
