Effectiveness of Oral-aural Programme on Language Development in Pre-primary Level Children with Hearing Impairment

The purpose of the present study is to emphasize the need for developing semantic language through oral-Aural programme in pre-primary level of children who are deaf and hard of hearing. The study focused on the significance of auditory reception skills vs. visual reception skills of children who were taught through aural-oral programme. The study was conducted on 34 children in the age range of 6 years to 10 years having severe to profound hearing loss. The standardized tool Language Profile Test (LPT) was used to conduct pre&post test for the study. The treatment program was given to17 hearing impaired children at pre- school for more than 30 sessions. Results of the study revealed that all the experimental subjects 6-10 years have achieved high mean scores in both receptive skills and in expressive language skills. Significant difference was found at the level of 0.01. It means that the oral-aural programme is effective for the language (semantic) development. Hence, the parents, pre-school teachers, audiologist and speech language pathologist would bring about significant changes in deaf and hard of hearing children.