A central feature of a sign bilingual approach is the use of sign language, and the associated role of deaf adults in deaf children's education. This project explores whether this approach is compatible with the goals of cochlear implantation, which are to maximise a deaf child's potential to hear and improve speech perception. There is no…

This study investigates whether children give different questionnaire-assessed hearing aid benefit scores than their parents. Sixteen children (age seven to 11 years) who wear hearing aids completed the child version of the Listening Situations Questionnaire while their parents completed the parent version. The mean difference between parent and…

One of the values of retrospective studies in bullying is that they give the "service-user" an opportunity to feed their experiences and suggestions back into the school system. This paper reports on the advice given to schools by a cross section of adults who were D/deaf (n = 35) during a qualitative, retrospective study on bullying that involves…

Following the development and standardization of the British Sign Language (BSL) Receptive Skills Test (Herman et al., 1999), the test was made widely available to professionals working with deaf children. Test users were asked to return completed score-sheets on individual children they had tested in order to compare a selection of children from…

There is clear evidence that increasing numbers of deaf students are now beginning to enter higher education (http://www.natdisteam.ac.uk). However, it is also evident that many of these students enter university presenting at below national norms in terms of their literacy. In short, many pre-lingual deaf students face an incredible language…

Successful inclusion for deaf pupils relies to a considerable extent on their mainstream teachers. This paper explores how student teachers can be educated to fulfil this role. A project involving students on a range of pathways to qualified teacher status used a narrative approach to motivate participants to engage with ideas in the field of…

This paper focuses on secondary school hearing students' perspectives on inclusion of peers who are deaf or hard of hearing (D/HH) in their general education classrooms. Adopting insights from contact theory and ecological theory of human development, the researchers examined the effects of contact related factors (contact experience, closeness,…

This paper examines some of the problems faced by deaf children when attempting to spell the words of written English. It analyses deaf children's awareness of English spelling patterns and considers whether there are spelling errors which are common to these children. Twenty-two children with varying degrees of hearing level were involved and…

Literature on bilingual education suggests that the material used in teaching second language writing has an impact on the quality of the text. In addition, the material interacts differently with the level of bilingual proficiency of the students. This paper attempts to explore the written stories of three deaf students, which were produced under…

Australia and New Zealand are two South Pacific nations with a shared history of British colonisation and close links maintained through kinship, travel, shared media and business relationships. Our public education systems also reflect a shared history of educational ideas and responses to the challenges of increasingly heterogeneous populations.…

This paper examines the construct of evidence-based practice, how existing data on the effectiveness of the Auditory-Verbal (A-V) approach for children with hearing loss are evaluated within this construct, and whether implementation of an A-V intervention model is therefore justified. It concludes with a recurrent call for action towards…

Cochlear implantation provides a means of hearing to profoundly deaf children. As it is an elective procedure, parents must make the decision to proceed with this option if their child is suitable. The processes involved are complex and stressful, involving hope and expectation on the one hand, and doubts and caution on the other. This study…

This study investigated parents' perceptions of their family's functioning and the level of early intervention support they received as they reflected on their involvement at an oral early intervention centre for children with hearing loss. Overall, parents reported high levels of family functioning and satisfaction with the services they had…

Consistent evidence from research studies between 1980 and 2000 indicates that deaf children lag behind hearing peers (by 2 to 3.5 years) in mathematics. This study seeks to explore the reasons for this persistent underachievement by focusing on results from the National Mathematics tests taken in the UK by all 14 year olds. The study analysed a…

This paper focuses on the oral referential communication skills of hearing-impaired (HI) children. A task based on that used with language impaired children by Leinonen and Letts (1997) was used to assess the speaking and listening skills of 20 HI children (mean age=10;2 years; mean better ear average hearing loss=88.85 dBHL). Their performance…