Professionals: Educators and Speech and Language Therapists

Educators 

Cued Speech can be used to fully support the deaf child’s access to language, the curriculum and all of school life from nursery through to university. Teachers themselves can use it – it is particularly helpful to support phonics learning for all children. Many hearing children benefit from having the consistent visual element that the cues add to a spoken message, particularly children for whom English is a second language or who themselves have any kind of auditory processing issue or language delay/disorder. Often it is the Teaching Assistants who learn to cue for a particular child, this may begin at a basic level but as the benefits become this may expand into a Transliterator role (see Literacy and accessing the language of education.).

Film  of a mainstream teacher explaining how she has used CS to help her whole class with phonics learning.

A short film  by a Teacher of the Deaf who uses CS to support literacy skills for school age children.

An Open letter to Teachers of the Deaf, by Cate Calder, explains what CS is and why it is so important for supporting deaf children to acquire a fluent mental model of the home language.

Document explaining the skills and role of professional Cued Speech Transliterators.

Document outlining the challenges faced by children in school with a range of language delay and how CS can meet their needs.

This is a newsletter article describing some of the results of using CS in a specialist school for the deaf with signing students. 

Speech and Language Therapists

Although CS was not devised to improve speech production in deaf children it almost always does and many Speech and Language Therapists find adding cueing to their skill set is of real benefit.  One of the main advantages - beyond enabling deaf children to perceive all the speech sounds and so develop a (visual) phonetic awareness – is that it helps deaf children to use clear and appropriate lip-patterns themselves.  It is also an invaluable tool in helping deaf children to perceive and use appropriate word endings such as plural and past tenses and develop a natural speech pattern with intonation. 

Speech and Language Therapist (SALT) Anne Clarke explains the use of CS at Thornfield House School for children with language impairments in Belfast.  SALTS, teachers and classroom assistants use CS daily with specific children to develop their phonological awareness, sequencing of sounds, blending and segmenting as well as speech production.