Some tips for teachers of students with hearing impairments

 If you're teaching students who have a hearing impairment, or even if English isn’t their first language, here are some tips to help you.

• Keep unnecessary noise to a minimum
  Background noise makes it difficult for some with a hearing impairment to learn, since concentration is affected. Even if your student or students use assistive hearing technology, they don't hear in the same way that their peers do. Blocking out some or all of this noise by closing doors or windows can be a simple and effective measure that will benefit students by reducing unnecessary background noise to a minimum.

• Consider the layout of the classroom
  Ensure that these students are in a position where your face is clearly visible (and ideally the faces of other students, if they're participating in class discussion), and where the sound of your voice is most audible.

• Use visual stimulus
  Students who have a hearing impairment or don’t have English as a first language require visual cues and support in their learning, in order to assist their understanding of content. Teachers can use visual stimuli, such as providing lesson outlines and main points, and putting any directions on interactive whiteboards (IWBs) or flip charts to help these students.

• Use captions
  All students benefit from captions, and especially those who are hearing-impaired or have English as a second language. To cater to these students, it's important to use only captioned multimedia, such as TV, online video and DVDs. Captions provide vital access to multimedia content and aren't restricted just to words. Emojis, icons and gifs are all part of our “visual lexicon”.

• Make use of available technology
  Many classrooms are now equipped with technologies such as IWBs and sound field amplification systems. If you have access to these technologies or anything similar, ensure that you’ve researched how to best use them in order to complement your teaching.

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