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Giving them an early start
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Auditory-verbal therapy uses the child's residual hearing to enhance his or her understanding of the world around.
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BIG CHAIR, small chair ... green chair, red chair. Sangeetha's gaze moves from one toy to another as her mother and teacher take turns identifying each object and its colour. "Sangeetha, can you pick up the green chair?" The pre-schooler's tiny hand moves hesitantly between the red and green and finally settles on one. She looks into their faces earnestly and seeing their approval, squeals in delight.
How do children pick up language? Naturally. By listening to people around them, especially their parents. "A child with a hearing impairment has lost out on all this," says Neela Govindaraj, an auditory-verbal therapist. At her hearing aid clinic, Sadhya Educational Trust, she helps parents of children with hearing impairment make up for lost time. Auditory-verbal therapy uses the child's residual hearing to enhance his or her understanding of the world around. "With language, understanding comes first. Speech comes later," she says.
A fundamental belief of this approach is that hearing-impaired children can be taught to listen with the help of the hearing aids, understand language and speak to communicate. The technique has been around for decades now, but it gained currency with the invention of cochlear implants. "It is about teaching your child to make sense of sounds," she explains. "And it is essentially a one-on-one process where the mother works with her child."
Mrs. Govindaraj helps Sangeetha's mother explain basic concepts to the four-year-old, using identification through both verbal and visual cues. Their sessions last for one hour each, and take place twice a week. But class does not begin or end there. Every happening at home is a teaching and learning opportunity and every event, a lesson.
The auditory-verbal approach often fills a yawning gap: the waiting period between detection of hearing impairment and the time when the child is eligible to join a special school (Many schools have a minimum age limit of four years).
The parent is at the centre of auditory-verbal therapy and thus must be empowered, says Mrs. Govindaraj. "We tell mothers to enjoy their time with their children," she says.
At the early ages between three months and four years, the focus is not on academics, but on something more fundamental: early integration. And when lessons are 24x7, mothers certainly make the best teachers.
By Akhila Seetharaman
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Life
Bangalore
Chennai
Coimbatore
Delhi
Hyderabad
Kochi
Madurai
Thiruvananthapuram
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