Children with auditory problems
A
AWhen young children cannot hear properly, whether through hearing loss or some other breakdown in auditory function, learning to speak and communicate is often set back, and their schooling suffers for it. The damage does not stop with the child; it reaches families and, in the end, society at large. Drawing on fifteen years of investigation, Ireland's Institute for Child Development reports that between 7 and 11 per cent of the country's children live with some measure of hearing loss.
B
BThat noise in the classroom is a serious problem for teachers and pupils alike has now been confirmed by an initial Irish study. Several things feed it: the way the desks are grouped together, the sound that funnels in along the hard corridors outside, and, above all, the growing number of pupils crammed into a single room. A further explanation has been put forward by the education researchers Halvorsen and Kruse, who argue that it is the modern preference for large, open rooms lined with hard, sound-reflecting surfaces that has driven noise levels upwards. Whatever its origins, this din is anything but trivial for a child whose auditory function is impaired: against such a background, keeping track of what classmates say and what the teacher asks becomes only harder still.
C
CUnease is mounting over the way ordinary classroom noise holds children back, and a child with an auditory deficit may be stopped from ever reaching the level he or she is capable of. Acting on guidance issued by the World Health Organization, a cross-border panel has now been convened by the International Association for Noise Abatement in Buildings, with Ireland among its members, and given the task of working out how noise and reverberation in schools might be brought under control.
D
DEveryone in a noisy classroom is affected, not only children who happen to have a disability; yet where a disability disturbs the way speech and language are handled, the child can be left especially exposed. Three broad groups of auditory deficit are at issue here: hearing that is impaired, the autistic spectrum disorders (ASD), and the attention deficit disorders (ADD/ADHD).
E
EA lifelong condition springing from both the brain and the genes, autism reshapes the way information is taken in and interpreted. What marks it out is a knot of interlocking difficulties across social imagination, social communication and social interaction. As Lindqvist observes, these upset a child's grasp of other people, of the events and objects in the surrounding world, and of the sensory signals coming in. A child with autism does not, in the end, learn or reason as a typically developing child does. One common upshot is real trouble in following and decoding spoken language. To many such children certain sounds, among them the roar of traffic and the din thrown off by machinery, are little short of painful. Just how far this goes is hard to pin down, since the sensitivity ranges enormously from one child to the next. What stays clear is that any sound a child finds intrusive is likely to impair how well information is absorbed.
F
FNeurological and inherited too, the attention deficit disorders reveal themselves through a familiar set of struggles: attention that will not stay put, effort and persistence that fade fast, shaky organisation, and acting without restraint. Filtering out what does not matter is beyond such a child, who takes in the whole of the surroundings at once rather than fixing on one task. A wash of classroom noise behind this becomes a formidable distraction, wearing concentration down.
G
GIsolating speech from a wall of background noise, and then making sense of it, can prove extraordinarily hard for a child with an auditory deficit. That background is fed from several directions at once: sound pushing in from activities beyond the walls, the comings and goings within the room, and further noise magnified wherever the space reverberates. What is needed is a set of strategies: better-built rooms, and perhaps some change to how the school day is organised. The toll such noise takes on children with an auditory deficit calls, in particular, for careful study. In all likelihood the school system holds many children whose disabilities have never been picked up, 'hidden' disabilities as one might call them, whose needs, unlike those of the already diagnosed, tend to slip by unanswered.
H
HFor its own part, the Irish government has drawn up a National Disability Framework and thrown it open to wide public consultation. The Framework concedes that disabled people meet real obstacles to a full and decent life, whether in the attitudes shown towards them, in education, in work, or in reaching the services they require. Objective 4 of the Framework, 'To Deliver the Best Possible Education for Disabled People', sets out to remake education so that every child, young learner and adult learner is given an equal chance to learn and grow inside the local school he or she already attends. Since so much of a sound education rests on the learning environment, whatever is done to better it promises to help all children, and those with auditory disabilities above all.
I
IRules of their own for holding classroom noise down are already being drafted in a number of nations, and before long Ireland is likely to do the same. What has been written so far on noise in schools tends to dwell on schoolchildren at large, on their teachers, and on those whose hearing is impaired; the pupils whose auditory deficits take some other form have drawn no more than passing notice. Should the international standards due to be issued in the years ahead prove worth having, the needs of these children cannot be allowed to fall outside the account.
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Question 1 - 6
Which section contains the following information?
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
1.
an estimate of how many children are affected
2.
the range of conditions that make certain pupils especially vulnerable to noise
3.
a description of a condition that disrupts social understanding
4.
the setting-up of an international working group
5.
a call for rules to be agreed between countries
6.
an outline of one government's official plan