Actual conditions of communication in hearing-impaired school children and students

Abstract

The present study was undertaken to investigate the actual conditions of communication in school children and students with various degrees of hearing loss in their daily life.
The participants of this study were 43 boys and 43 girls aged six to twenty years who visited our clinic during July and August,2006. They were receiving education at regular primary, middle and high schools as well as schools for the deaf or other educational institutions, including colleges and universities.
Their actual conditions of communication were analyzed in terms of communication modes and difficulty in communication with hearing people. The results obtained were as follows:
1) The average hearing losses of their better ear ranged from 23 dB to over 100 dB.
2) Nineteen of the 86 children were attending schools for the deaf where manual communication was permitted in addition to oral communication, while the remaining 67 were receiving education at ordinary schools, colleges or universities with normal-hearing peers.
3) Twenty-two of the 86 participants were unaware of difficulty in oral communication with or without hearing aids in their school life, but the remaining 64 complained of difficulty in oral communication to a greater or lesser degree. Some of the latter cases were suffering from isolation or emotional distress caused by difficulty in communication among normal-hearing peers. Eventually they shifted to schools for the deaf, where they were no longer isolated nor experienced a sense of alienation.
These findings suggest that for hearing-impaired children, generally speaking, communication disorders due to hearing loss may be inevitable when among normal-hearing peers. Therefore, more attention should be paid to introducing manual communication modes into communication with hearing-impaired children.