Teaching Students with Sensory Impairments
Definitions, Identification, and Supportive Professionals
Dolly Bhargava, M. Spec. Ed.
VI. Learning Characteristics
Hearing is one of the most important senses. It plays a vital part in the learning
process. It is held that more than 80% of education is received through hearing
(Pagliano, 1994). American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA)
stipulates that hearing impairment can affect children in the following ways:
 It causes delay in the development of receptive and expressive spoken
language skills. It also usually causes delay in general language
acquisition and receptive and expressive communication. (However, in the
minority of deaf children born to signing Deaf families, language and
communication skills usually develop at a normal rate.)
 The language deficit can cause learning problems that result in reduced
academic achievement.
* Communication difficulties may often lead to social isolation and poor selfconcept.
* It may have an impact on vocational choices.
Hearing impairment can impose basic limitations on an individual in terms of
-
access to spoken language
-
access to environmental auditory experiences
-
ease of interacting with a wide range of people, due to the above
restrictions.
Difficulty in accessing spoken language may appears to be an obvious result of
hearing impairment. On the contrary, there are many variables which affect just
how much access a hearing impaired person has to spoken language. As noted
earlier, there are different levels of hearing loss; yet, even within these levels
many layers exist. For example, two different people may have the same type of
hearing loss, the same level of hearing loss and all practical, physiological
processes could be almost identical, but they may not have the same access to
spoken language. Person A may have acquired the hearing loss post-lingually,
which has provided the opportunity to hear and the hearing nerves to be used.
Person B may have had to learn to listen without ever experiencing sound, and
would have had to learn that sound itself has meaning before beginning to
interpret what those sounds mean.
Clear access to speech is contingent upon many variables, including:

background noise being at a minimum

well-functioning and optimal hearing technology

clear speech being expressed by the speaker
Hearing technology continues to improve but still has limitations. One of the
limitations is that background noise is not usually completely eliminated when a
person with hearing impairment is listening to some source of sound. This
means that the important information (i.e., speech) has to be separated from the
background noise during cognitive processing.
Clear speech is not exaggerated speech, and the student with hearing
impairment uses all the visual and auditory information available to aid
understanding of the message. If any of these are exaggerated or distorted, the
student has to cognitively explore the possibilities of what was said before trying
to repair their misunderstanding of the message. Accents, speech impediments,
prostheses (braces), moustaches and beards can all contribute to the challenge
of understanding with ease.
Environmental auditory experiences enable hearing students to retrieve
information about what is happening in their environment. Hearing students are
able to learn incidentally about the world around them and about important
functions of language. In contrast, students with a hearing impairment are rarely
able to hear enough (without attending to a specific interaction) to learn
incidentally from:

Discussions and interactions between parents, teachers, other adults or
peers

Disagreements or resolutions between these same people

Television or radio

Conversations on the telephone.
(Calderon & Greenberg, 2003, p. 179)
Most environmental sounds are very informative. Hearing sounds around the
house can indicate where a person is and what that person might be doing. For
example, hearing water boiling or the microwave timer lets you know that
someone is cooking in the kitchen. Environmental sounds can help you predict
what might happen next. For example, hearing the phone ring tells you that
someone will get up and move to another area, or start you wondering if that the
phone call might be for you. When they hear such things, subconsciously,
hearing people make predictions and assumptions without effort. For person
with hearing impairment, some of these environmental sounds may be heard and
some may not, which in turn means that the appropriate assumptions and
predictions may not be made. A student with hearing impairment may not
understand why the teacher and all the students are looking out the window,
when they heard a car crash on the road outside, or why the teacher stops
talking and looks at some other students in the room who have been whispering.
Warnings of danger, such as smoke alarms, fire alarms and car horns are usually
given by sound signals, and the student with a hearing impairment may not be
aware of the location of the sounds or what they mean. Some of these auditory
signals can be supplemented by a range of visual ones, such as flashing strobe
lights. These accommodations should be considered by schools with students
who are hearing impaired.
All these factors are challenges to students with hearing impairments. While most
will be aware of the challenges, they may not always be aware of the strategies
they can employ to help them glean information to stay abreast of the
happenings in their environment. These strategies can be utilized and
encouraged by teachers.
The student with hearing impairment obviously has to consider events and make
predictions more consciously than the average hearing student. This can be
extraordinarily tiring (Calderon & Greenberg, 2003) and can have the effect of
causing the ability to do these very things to deteriorate. On a given day some
students may be easily able to understand what the teacher is saying even
though there is construction work happening outside, but on another day, may
not be able to understand at all.
There are a number of factors that can contribute to ease of understanding, and
these are covered in the Accommodations section of this web site.
The student’s ability to access spoken language, environmental auditory
experiences, and ease of interaction with others will depend on the type and
degree of hearing impairment, self-awareness and acceptance, and on the
educational, personal and practical support available.
How do students who are hearing impaired develop an understanding of
concepts, communication, and social skills as well as the ability to independently
participate in everyday activities? The following areas are underscored by a
variety of authors (Marschark, n.d.); Smith, Polloway, Patton & Dowdy (2004);
and ASHA (n.d) as some of those that are affected by a hearing impairment:
Early relationships, experience and early learning opportunities of the hearing
impaired student will have made a lasting impact upon that student’s ongoing
social, language, cognitive, and emotional development.
Communication and language are greatly affected by hearing impairment. Early
delay in receptive and expressive communication skills may have an ongoing
impact upon the student’s ability to understand, process and use the information
being acquired throughout one’s educational life. Individual students with hearing
impairment may have varying abilities in their communication abilities. The student
may have difficulties with reading or with subjects incorporating jargon specific to
that subject, but not used much in everyday language. There may also be
difficulties with hypothesizing or with seeing things from another person’s
perspective.
Social skills refer to those skills necessary for effective communication with other
people. They include both verbal and non-verbal behaviors. Some of the skills
include eye contact, proximity, word choice, intonation, ability to read non-verbal
cues, facial expressions, take the perspective of another, shift attention, and
maintain topic of conversation (Disability News, 2001). Social skills are crucial to
our lives for personal, academic and vocational success. A student with a hearing
impairment has difficulty with accessing auditory information and expressing ideas
in a way that others can understand. The Learning Disabilities Association of
Ontario (1999) states that a student with hearing impairment may appear
disoriented, distracted, or at times confused because of difficulties with accessing
accurate auditory information. The student may try to cope with difficult situations
by copying peers or pretending to understand what is going on in the class while
actually misunderstanding the situation. The student with hearing impairment may
appear to hear normally, when in fact the student can not hear speech sounds
clearly enough and is misinterpreting the information. The student may have
difficulties pronouncing speech sounds correctly, poor vocal quality, or trouble
explaining ideas clearly. All of the above- stated factors can negatively impact
social skill development as well as the ability to freely communicate, resulting in the
student becoming shy, socially isolated, or displaying behaviors of concern
(Learning Disabilities Association of Ontario, 1999).
It is important to be aware of potential areas of difficulty and to note when any
confusion or misunderstandings begin to occur. Rectifying confusion or
misunderstandings early is imperative in order to ensure the foundational
information is understood before placing more scaffolding information on top. One
suggestion is offering to give more information or background material to the
student, parents, or the visiting support teacher, to preview or review the
information being covered. It can be helpful to have students act out or present
information visually to enable clearer and deeper understanding of complex
information.
Marschark (2002) suggests that these students “may have different knowledge,
cognitive strategies and experiences” from hearing students and that we need to
support the student with hearing impairment by utilizing skills and acknowledging
areas of difficulty (p. 10).
As discussed above, the student may lag behind in achievement in comparison
to hearing peers due to the impact of hearing impairment on learning. Therefore,
the student may require skills in these areas to be specifically and explicitly
taught, along with additional time and opportunities to practice these skills.