Faculty of Humanities
School of Social Sciences
Department of Communication Pathology
Selected Highlights from Research Findings
The entire context of South African education is undergoing a slow, yet definite metamorphosis, and inclusive education has become not only a constitutional imperative, but also an unequivocal reality.
The educational inclusion of the deaf child poses challenges to teachers in mainstream South African schools. The knowledge and attitude of teachers towards this system and their responsibilities towards children with hearing loss formed the basis of this research project entitled: Inclusive education in South Africa: The challenges posed to the teacher of the child with a hearing loss.
Findings indicate that teachers in mainstream education have sufficient knowledge about the theoretical aspects of inclusion, but that they lack knowledge regarding the specific disability. A wide variety of demands are imposed on teachers and the problems they experience were identified and include a lack of support, training and the high teacher/child ratios.
It appears as though teachers and student teaches have negative attitudes towards the inclusion of deaf children and indicated specific needs in terms of further training. The implications of this study include the motivation for the promotion of educational audiology in order to support and train teachers of deaf children in inclusive education.
The education system is challenged to address the needs of teachers in order to ensure the successful implementation of inclusive education for children with hearing loss.
Dr L Pottas
Communication Pathology
+27 (0) 12 420 2815
lidia.pottas@up.ac.za
The development of language and communication skills in young children is directly related to future academic success. Multilingualism, which has become a universal phenomenon, may mask the presence of language impairment in a young child if the pre-school teacher is not proficient in the young learner's primary language.
In some urban areas in South Africa, where many languages are presented in each classroom, the language of mutual understanding is English and the assessment of language behaviour is conducted in English. The aim of this doctoral study was to determine the feasibility of constructing a profile of typical English behaviour for a group of multilingual pre-school learners.
The findings showed that it was possible to identify typical language behaviours. The information was used to construct a 'Comprehensive profile' of typical language behaviours, a more compact 'Essential classroom profile', and a 'Profile of risk indicators' to identify young learners at risk for language impairment.
An action plan was designed to indicate the way in which these three profiles maybe used by the collaborative team of speech-language therapists and pre-school teacher for language assessment, the identification of learners with language impairment, and the facilitation of language development for English Additional Language learners.
Ms EC Naudé
Communication Pathology
+ 27 (0) 12 420 2814
elsie.naude@up.ac.za
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