A Multicase Study on Teachers' Supervision of Hearing Impaired Children

The general objective of this study was to assess teachers? supervision of the hearing impaired (HI) children in their speech production and how they progress in their session for speech intervention. Participants were selected from the three government schools with SpEd Center for hearing impaired children. One teacher and two HI children of the same age were recruited from each school. Informed consent was secured before data collection through in-depth interview, key informant interview and observation including five weeks of researcher-conducted daily interventions. To preserve confidentiality, the informants were coded in consecutively numbered ID. The data were analyzed through triangulation by member check. The participants? responses indicated that beyond teaching, they view their role as therapist to HI children with hearing devices and counselor to parents, as educator, and as always a teacher. The HI children showed progress in their speech production after the intervention. The teacher participants have varied adequacy of training and instructional competencies in teaching speech to the HI children. Misbehavior, comprehension, handling multi-grade classes, less parental support, insufficient time to cope with the ancillary work on top of teaching responsibility, teaching multiple learning areas a day, and curriculum -related problems, like the MTB-MLE were the common challenges met by the teachers in teaching. Thus, teachers are the key persons to help the HI to develop speech after they have been fitted with good hearing devices. Speech production is possible for the HI children who will undergo proper intervention. Teachers handling HI children vary in their adequacy of trainings and encountered different challenges as they teach them in relation to their speech production.