[My Deaf Child 2] Make the best use of the child's hearing mother resignation to accompany the child to practice hair during the prime time

"It's actually very difficult to teach a deaf child to speak. We are fighting against time."

Principal Pang, who has been engaged in speech therapy for 30 years, said. From zero to three years old is the prime time for children to develop language. When parents take their children to learn foreign languages, parents of deaf children are teaching their children to pronounce every sound accurately.

Speech therapy started five months after birth

"For a long time, Shunqin could only pronounce the M sound. For example, words like 'mother' could not even say 'daddy'." Tan Shunqin's mother said.

Shunqin is six years old this year, born with moderate to severe hearing impairment in both ears, and began to receive speech training after five months of defecation. Once a week, forty-five minutes each time. "Actually, I train for about an hour every day, and then I read for another half an hour. It seems like I'm chasing the time, because every time you teach him a word, he knows another word." Shunqin's mother couldn't help but burst into tears. Deaf children have poor auditory memory. Even if they learn the pronunciation and meaning of a word in class, it is only short-term memory. "Who can tell him more than twenty or three times? It's the mother." Principal Pang asked the parents to accompany the deaf child in class, and Shunqin's mother would take enough class notes and continue training at home.

"Auditory Oral Grammar": Practice listening first, then learn pronunciation

Chain listening to learn pronunciation

"Severely hearing-impaired children can only hear very few sounds after wearing hearing aids. But these sounds are very important, and their hearing must be used to the fullest!" Principal Pang advocates "auditory oral grammar", relying on hearing aids and cochlear implants to transmit The voice of the deaf children, and then through the extremely quiet environment and "one-to-one" teaching, constantly speaking in the ears of deaf children, honing only hearing. "S sound or Ch sound is more difficult, but these sounds are breath sounds and can be sensed with some feathers or tissues." Principal Pang pointed out that deaf children must hear them before they can pronounce Cantonese tones. "We teach him the initials and finals in the game, and after he can pronounce it, he learns word by word and sentence by sentence." The training also includes intelligence, memory, logic, etc., hoping to make deaf children more accurate when reading lips and remembering mouth shapes.

"There is no free lunch. If you have a weaker sense, you must work harder than others. In the final analysis, let him (deaf boy) learn to speak as soon as possible and lay a solid foundation for language, and he will be able to study in ordinary primary schools. .” Principal Pang even advertised that deaf children who graduated from the center could go to university.

The first condition for deaf not to be dumb is to "hear"

In "Auditory Oral Grammar", the primary condition for a deaf child to be able to speak is a hearing aid or successful surgery to restore a certain degree of hearing​. In mainstream school and social settings, does learning to speak mean integration into the listening world? This is the second part of the "My Deaf Child" series, which will be three episodes in a row, taking readers to see the silent childhood of deaf children in Hong Kong.

Originally published at hk.news.appledaily.com on 6 November, 2017.