Adopted or Not, Hearing Health and Listening Comprehension Affect Our Children

There was a very interesting article posted on the ASHA Sphere Blog today.  Written by Deborah Hwa-Froelich, PhD, CCC-SLP, the article titled Hearing Health and Development Following Adoption brings up a number of very important – and tightly linked – issues.

1. How a small amount of fluid buildup in the middle ear can affect balance and hearing acuity.
2. How, after seeking medical advice and completing impedance testing, she says that her results were in the low-normal range and that “most medical professionals would not treat a patient who exhibited these symptoms preferring to wait until the patient demonstrated consistent flat tympanograms or infection.”  But, without exhibiting either of these conditions, she had significantly reduced hearing acuity, especially in noisy environments like the classroom. She wonders how children can focus and learn when they have fluid in the middle ear.
3. How children who have resided in orphanages around the world – who receive less than adequate medical care – may have untreated otitis media and become accustomed to the symptoms of ear pain, imbalance, and poor hearing acuity. And when parents who adopt these children they expect the child to exhibit and demonstrate certain behaviors of discomfort when the child is ill. However, because of the lack of attention to hearing health, the children do not show the typical symptoms of pain or lack of balance and thus the parents may not recognize – and then not seek – medical care.
4. Many orphanages do not provide the social interaction that children need to learn which sounds are meaningful to attend to or what certain sounds mean.  And that some children, even years after they are adopted and have passed a hearing screening and audiological evaluation, did not alter to environmental sounds (whistles, knocks on the door, telephones, or their name being called). Some children have difficulty attending to and discriminating speech from noise.  Undetected and undiagnosed hearing loss is also not uncommon.

They Can Hear. But Can They Listen?
The Difference Is Critical To Their Academic Success. 
How Will You Know?

Listening is the gateway to learning and your students spend upwards of 70% of their school day engaged in some listening activity.Their ability to hear can easily be seen, but their ability to listen is very different. Many students have great difficulty understanding speech. Studies show that upwards of 25% of the students in any elementary classroom, on any given day, may have trouble understanding speech. It may be caused by a mild hearing loss, auditory or language processing problems, the acoustics in the classroom or problems discerning speech sounds from background noises.Listening disorders affect people of all ages. Over 11% of all school aged children have a hearing loss serious enough to limit their ability to understand what is being said. Often the symptoms cannot be seen, and when they are, they are often mistaken for ADD/ADHD rather than a hearing or listening problem - and then treated for, and medicated for a problem that they don’t have.This program will cover the following topics:

• An overview of Dysfunctional Listening and its affect on student achievement
• Minimal Hearing Loss and how it affects learning and language development
• Auditory and Language Processing Disorders - what they are and how they affect your students progress
• Speech Understandability - how your speech can affect your students ability to understand you
• Classroom Technologies for Improved Understanding - what technologies can improve these student’s chances for success.