Other ways
The Structured Oral approach
The Structured Oral approach is more often used in education than for supporting a deaf child’s communication development in the early years. It uses residual hearing and lip-reading, and often combines these with written language to support children’s learning.
The Structured Oral approach uses a lot of structure and systematic teaching to support the learning of speech and language.
The Maternal Reflective approach
The Maternal Reflective approach is also sometimes called the ‘graphic oral’ method. Like the structured oral approach, this approach is more likely to be used in an educational setting, probably in a school for deaf children or a mainstream school with resourced provision where groups of deaf children are taught together.
The Maternal Reflective approach is based on the way mothers or carers encourage language through conversation, and children are encouraged to ‘reflect’ back on the conversations, to look back at what was said and how it was said.
The approach is also called ‘graphic oral’ because it involves writing down a lot of what is said to help children ‘reflect’ on it to help them learn language.