EARLY INTERVENTION AND SPEAKING LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT FOR CHILDREN WITH HEARING LOSS

On January 14, 2023, Ms. Duong Phuong Hanh - Director of the Center for Research and Education of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (CED) gave online counseling to relatives of a child with hearing loss in Quang Ninh to help the child develop speaking ability when wearing suitable hearing aids.

The consultation went through the following steps:

Find out information about the child:

- Age, listening age, listening-speaking ability at the present time.

- The child's learning at school, the role of teachers, individual educational programs, ...

- Parent's homeschooling: time, activities, concerns, ...

- Their interactions with other children, relatives and people around.

From the information about the child provided by the parents, the intervention direction for the child was as following:

- Intervention through stages: recognizing sounds, distinguishing two completely different sounds, two similar sounds, and finally, performing complex commands. Teaching children could be intertwined with the above activities, depending on the difficulty level of the vocabulary.

- Parents need to create a positive listening environment to help children like sounds, especially paying attention to the up and down tones of words, singing activities, learning to play, playing to learn.

Parents were also encouraged to update about their child's progress for support in planning their child's next step in language development.