“The foundation of the Auditory-Verbal approach is that, with the use of hearing aids or a cochlear implant, hearing impaired children can learn to listen and understand spoken language in order to communicate through speech.”

“Techniques

As an early implant user is often a strong visual learner, a hand cue will help in highlighting listening rather than lipreading. When a child is watching an adult’s face, it is necessary for the speaker to cover his/her own mouth to alert the child to listen. By then moving the speaker’s hand towards the child’s mouth, this serves as a cue for the child to imitate what he/she heard. Imitation should only be encouraged if a child begins to use meaningful sounds spontaneously. This imitation can also be used with parents as models to encourage their participation. Once a child relies on hearing, use of a hand cue will seldom be necessary to encourage listening or speech production.”

Okay fine, it sounds reasonable to use cues to remind children to practice listening and to train their ears to interpret the speech input, but if in practice teachers are running around covering their mouths, how is that helpful in the long run? Deaf children with CIs also need to learn lipreading, don’t they?

God, it just seems so cruel. Like making them sit on their hands. Whatever happened to Total Communication?