By young people speaking

Difficult to convey through writing — the sound of young deaf voices! You can hear them on our video, Sound Sense, or by coming along to one of our meetings, or we will put you in touch with a family near you. Otherwise you have to take our word for it that, through the Natural Aural Approach, deaf children develop clear, effective spoken language.

It may take them a little longer, it varies from child to child. When they are young, it sometimes takes strangers a little while to ‘tune in’ (as it can when you listen to someone with a strong regional accent) but the more the children talk the better they get at it. So when they are in their teens sometimes you cannot even tell that they are deaf.

By young people doing well at school

Reading and writing have been difficult for deaf children in the past, usually because they did not have a firm grasp on spoken language first. Imagine trying to read a language you don’t speak and you’ll begin to understand why 20 years ago, most deaf teenagers were leaving school reading like 9 year olds. The same is true for writing — it is a code and if you have the sounds in your head it is easier to understand what writing is about.

If you don’t read and write well, it is difficult to do well at school. With the Natural Aural Approach, reading and writing are built on a firm grasp of spoken language and so, for most children, it’s easier.

Not every deaf child will do well at school. Not all hearing children do. But young deaf people are now, because of the Natural Aural Approach, achieving previously unheard of standards...

By reading standards

A study in 1994 showed that amongst a group of Natural Aural school-leavers the average reading age had improved from the level of a 9 year old (as it was found to be in 1979) to 13½. A big improvement but still not good enough — until you remember that, these days, there are many hearing kids who don’t read as well as they should.

There are deaf kids like that too but there are also Natural Aural deaf kids who can read better than expected at their age. In the 1998 study, 1 in 4 of the Natural Aural kids who were taking GCSEs read so well that they were ‘off the top of the test’.

By GCSE Results

20 years ago it was very rare for deaf students to take public exams at all. The percentage educated through other approaches who take them still seems very low. And often their results are disappointing. Between 1995 and 1997 a group of Natural Aural students did 5% better than the national hearing average in achieving five or more grades A* to C (the level that is normally required for further education). 70% of these students went on to further or higher education.

By jobs and careers

There has been no research on this so we cannot provide figures. We can provide facts though, — details of nurses, of shop managers, of computer programmers, of garage mechanics, of teachers, of hairdressers, of architects, — a whole range of careers that deaf people educated through the Natural Aural Approach are following.

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