Progressive auditory-verbal approaches at Mount View Deaf Facility within the mainstream Mount View Primary School in Glen Waverley, (Australia), are presented in this report.
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Learning side by side helps deaf children thrive
Marilyn Dann, the facility’s first coordinator, now lectures at Melbourne University and says:
Often we would hear our deaf students begin to use colloquialisms that had only come from interacting with hearing peers. Children will grow up in mainstream society and learn to navigate it, to be advocates for themselves. Hearing children [also] gain … from being at Mount View. They will grow up seeing deafness is a part of life.
Children and their families are tasked each year to make at least 12 months’ progress in spoken language with experience trips, incidental daily interactions and parent coaching.
Ireland’s hearing-units for deaf students presently don’t offer auditory verbal therapy teaching approaches, but use total communication strategies. The Sound Advice team would like this to change in line with parent wishes, new technologies and international best practice.
Evidence also shows that quality, early childhood education programs reduce the need for special education supports at a later stage of the child’s education. Children who access auditory-verbal education from one year of age, routinely start preschool and kindergarten with spoken language levels equivalent to their peers, and this fact needs highlighting.
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