Teaching Hearing-Impaired Children in Regular Classrooms

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Since the enactment of Public Law 94-142 (The Education for All Handicapped Children Act) in 1975, approximately one-half of all hearing impaired students in the United States have had the opportunity to be mainstreamed into regular education classrooms. This law was intended to ensure that any student with disabilities had access to a ."..free and appropriate education as identified in each child's IEP." I teach at Northside Elementary in Colleton County. This school has seven hearing impaired students ranging from seven to eleven years old. All of these students are mainstreamed in regular classrooms for a portion of their day. Our hearing impaired teacher is at our school for the first half of the day and at a middle school the second half. She has one full-time certified interpreter and one full-time assistant. Joshua, the youngest hearing impaired student at Northside, is mainstreamed into my regular first grade classroom. He is with my class for Reading, Math, Social Studies, Science, Health, lunch, recess, and special areas (Music, Art, Library, Physical Education, and Computer Lab). He is with the hearing impaired teacher for writing and spelling for approximately one hour per day. He is with the resource teacher for extra help in math and reading for an hour per day and with the speech teacher half an hour, three days a week. Joshua is the fourth hearing-impaired student I have had the opportunity to teach in seven years at Northside. To accommodate the needs of my hearing impaired students, I took two sign language classes. I learned ASL (American Sign Language) and how to teach hearing impaired students by using a philosophy called Total Communication. I have chosen to do a case stud... ... middle of paper ... ...even with these threats to the internal and external validity of this case study, the researcher believes that the Total Communication approach would benefit any hearing impaired student mainstreamed in a regular classroom. Conclusion In a replication of this study, the researcher would continue to teach all first grade hearing impaired students to determine if their reading levels would increase by using Total Communication. The researcher would need to control for certain extraneous variables such as absenteeism, methods of teaching and parental support. The information found through this study will be used to educate teachers at Northside on ways to teach the hearing impaired. Although this study concluded that using Total Communication in a regular classroom does increase a hearing impaired student's reading level, further research is needed.

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