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Graduate students TALK with children

UH speech pathology graduate students work hand-in-hand day in and day out with hearing impaired children to help them develop confidence and communicate with their peers effectively. | Courtesy of Ramsay McCoy

UH speech pathology graduate students work hand-in-hand day in and day out with hearing impaired children to help them develop confidence and communicate with their peers effectively. | Courtesy of Ramsay McCoy

UH speech pathology graduate students worked with speech pathology professionals this summer to help children with hearing disabilities learn to communicate.

Project TALK is a week-long summer camp that was started to bring children with hearing loss together to support each other as they develop speech, language and listening skills.

“We’ve found (by) incorporating graduate students, we were able to train more pre-professionals how to work with hearing loss and how to maximize the speech and language development of these kids and build their confidence,” said Sara Norwood, lead speech pathologist over the camp.

“Speech therapists in the public school setting or even in private practice might not come across children with hearing loss on a regular basis, and so it’s a great way to help people be armed with knowledge of what to do and what to watch for and to have that familiarity with children with hearing loss.”

The UH students planned one activity each day for the campers based on the language needs of the children in their group. By simplifying or making their language more complex based on the children’s abilities, they were able to broaden each child’s vocabulary and grammar while practicing a variety of speech language therapy strategies, including expansion, modeling, labeling, and linguistic mapping.

“They were great. It’s really fun to watch how one the ideas they come up with. It’s really cool to see what kind of activities they come up with (and) how they get the language out of the kids,” Norwood said.

Though the UH students were in charge of planning and executing their own activities, they were never far from help.

“Each one of (the UH students) has a supervisor rotate through. (The supervisors) comment on what they’re doing, tell them what they’re doing great, tell them strategies to work on and they can immediately implement all of that feedback in the next session, so you see growth from Monday to Friday,” Norwood said. “It’s tremendous what (the supervisors) get to see.”

The camp was held at the Center For Hearing and Speech. Everyone associated with the camp, from the speech therapists to the office staff, worked together to make the event run smoothly and contributed to the camp’s continuing success.

“Project Talk was a great experience for us to grow as clinicians. We worked with kids all day long, focusing on expanding and improving their language expression,” said Jacquilyn Arias Carcamo, a UH speech pathology graduate student.

“It was amazing to see the level of language used by kids with profound hearing loss. The kids were ready to meet any language challenge we provided, and they consistently rose to higher levels each day.”

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2 Comments

  • The Orange County Deaf Advocacy Center http://www.deafadvocacy.org gets all excited whenever there is news of babies with hearing loss getting cochlear implants and news that parents are opting to get their child with hearing loss cochlear implants. We have a rich website that supports the reasoning for cochlear implants http://www.tinyurl.com/deafbabies with plenty of heart warming videos. Not to mention that our agency is moving on upwards with newer medical technology to mitigate hearing loss as our powerpoint presentation we presented in San Diego http://tinyurl.com/stemcellfixdeaf earlier this year. The best life journey for babies with hearing loss begins with sound, listening, and then speaking.

  • The Orange County Deaf Advocacy Center http://www.deafadvocacy.org gets all excited whenever there is news of babies with hearing loss getting cochlear implants and news that parents are opting to get their child with hearing loss cochlear implants. We have a rich website that supports the reasoning for cochlear implants http://www.tinyurl.com/deafbabies with plenty of heart warming videos. Not to mention that our agency is moving on upwards with newer medical technology to mitigate hearing loss as our powerpoint presentation we presented in San Diego http://tinyurl.com/stemcellfixdeaf earlier this year. The best life journey for babies with hearing loss begins with sound, listening, and then speaking.

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