Researchers come up with manual for therapy of hearing impaired

The Auditory Learning Manual (ALM) is a systematic framework developed for professionals working with children with hearing loss whose primary language is Marathi by a team of Aishwarya Malu, Dr CS Vanaja and Shweta Deshpande of SASLP

Researchers and professors at the Bharati Vidyapeeth’s School of Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology (SASLP) have come up with the country’s first Auditory Learning Manual (ALM) for providing therapy to Marathi-speaking children with hearing impairment. The manual on Friday received a copyright from the Government of India, the officials said.

This creates the necessity to develop an auditory learning manual in Marathi which would be helpful and practical for professionals working with children with hearing impairment whose first language is Marathi. (REPRESENTATIVE PIC)

The Auditory Learning Manual (ALM) is a systematic framework developed for professionals working with children with hearing loss whose primary language is Marathi by a team of Aishwarya Malu, Dr CS Vanaja and Shweta Deshpande of SASLP.

Aishwarya Malu, former consultant audiologist and speech-language pathologist at SASLP, said, the manual was developed in 2018 and the same was used for four years during the therapy sessions.

“The ALM primarily focuses on the development of auditory skills of the child. It can be used by professionals for therapy of children up to four years of age. Based on the age and ability to speak, the therapy can be selected from the manual,” she said.

As per the researchers, the prevalence of hearing disability in the state of Maharashtra is 332 per 100,000 persons, (NSSO, 2002) and to the best of the researcher‘s knowledge, there is no such manual available for the above purpose in the regional language ie Marathi.

This creates the necessity to develop an auditory learning manual in Marathi which would be helpful and practical for professionals working with children with hearing impairment whose first language is Marathi.

Dr CS Vanaja, principal, SASLP, said, in Maharashtra, Marathi is the native language spoken by a majority of the people. To train the Marathi-speaking children with hearing impairment, the ALM was developed while working with the children, their families, and professionals.

The ALM is a systematic framework developed for professionals working with children with hearing impairment whose primary language is Marathi. It consists of six sections that progress from simple auditory perception tasks to complex processing tasks. Each section has material that contains all the phonemes of the Marathi language. All the sections have subskills that include test items and practice lists along with activities that will help in learning the required skill. The manual has to be administered before initiating therapy to obtain a baseline score for the child and then reassessment can be done to check the acquired skills.

Responses can be scored in the scoring sheet using a 3-point rating scale as follows:

0 - implies the skill is not present

1 - implies the skill is emerging and

2 - implies the skill is achieved