Hearing and Literacy: What were your main findings?

Let's go through them systematically.

• Indigenous Australian students in this project had a very high prevalence of ear disease and persisting hearing disabilities compared to non-Indigenous students. Very fundamental, but one has to accept this to move forward and the data clearly supports this.

• The relationship between hearing loss and decreased school achievement for Indigenous students was again strongly established.

• Hearing support services at school are especially relevant for Indigenous students learning English as a second language — this can't be underestimated! English is the school language, and students who have to work at the stressful activity of trying to understand what is said on the basis of second language or foreign language issues, and then have a hearing loss on top of that, encounter a nearly impossible task. Hearing support services are very important to bridge that difficulty.

• Phonological awareness scores predict literacy level. The importance behind this is that when one gets down to the pedagogical issues in teaching literacy and teach literacy to children with even modest hearing impairment, the desire is very strong to make an auditory approach seem very helpful to the phonological process and that's what phonological awareness specialisation would readily allow in this case. It's really an opportunity to make the auditory system exercise, and this becomes very important when children have a hearing impairment and don't have the usual experiences in early childhood of phonological processing.

• Something again that is entirely reversible — classroom acoustics. They vary throughout the Territory schools considerably, but they are generally very poor listening environments for students with hearing disability, especially when they are learning English as a foreign or second language. Classroom acoustics standards are in development and there are methods that should be incorporated to reduce the very high reverberation and the very high background noise that makes listening extremely difficult for students. Classroom sound field systems shouldn't be used to just compensate for poor classroom acoustics. The combination of the management of classroom acoustics and the sound field system will go far distance in improving these situations.

• Many students have reduced capacity to process auditory information. Central auditory processing disorders may be part of the sequel to the early onset of conductive hearing loss. So not only are we saying that learning English as a second language is difficult and learning English as a second language becomes even more difficult when a child has a hearing impairment — but now we have to rely on the hundreds of investigations that have supported the notion that if there is an interruption in normal audition during early childhood years, and you may certainly expect to see processing disorders occurring.

Finally, the one statement that reflects the data clearly from over a thousand students in the Territory, high attending Indigenous students who have ear disease and hearing loss, where there has been intervention — they stay in school longer and achieve above intensive English.