INTERACTION OF A HEARING IMPAIRED CHILD WITH HER IMMEDIATE COMMUNITY AS MEDIATED BY SYMBOLS AND SIGNS

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CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Structure and Rationale of the Study

To communicate is to satisfy man’s individual need for social, emotional, and human development. Communication is considered a basic human need for people cannot not communicate. We all need to communicate to develop our full potentials.

These potentialities, however, are being held up in the case of the hearing-impaired people. They are not able to develop their full potentials for their faculty of understanding is also impaired. They have the special need of having other means of communicating. They are in need of a medium that would help them express and communicate what is on their minds. Concisely, they need to engage in communication activities that would cater and satisfy their special needs – to understand and to be understood.

Hearing impairment is the most common birth defect. Statistics show that there are about 3 in every 1000 babies born with hearing impairment (KidsHealth.org, nd). Hearing impairment happens when there is a defect with a part or parts of the ears. Also, a hearing-impaired is observed to be hearing only some sounds or nothing at all.

In the Philippine survey conducted by the Department of Health (DOH) and the University of the Philippines (UP) in 2003, hearing disability ranked second highest form of disability with a percentage rate of 33%. Moreover, according to the DOH National Registry in 1997, 17% or 97,957 per 577,345 Filipinos are hearing-impaired (Better Hearing Philippines Inc, 2008).

These figures show that there is a huge number of Filipinos suffering from communication related problems. Millions of them are having difficulties in communicating effectively with the hearing population. There are grea...

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