Development of Communication Skills Through Auditory Training Software in Special Education

Abstract

There have been issues identified regarding the education of children with hearing disorders. Those do not allow the development of communicative-linguistic competence and language, in addition to an efficient oral or written communication. This causes deficits in vocabulary, delay in morph syntactic structure. Education technologies such as auditory training software have become an educational support for teachers and students. The software was developed to improve communication skills and divided into modules with ascending degrees of difficulty. They are presented in various environments and semantic fields. After about 4 months of effective use in an 8-month period, applied to 45 preschool and elementary school students aged between 4 and 12 years, considering that 11 children present auditory handicap and the rest intellectual handicap, the results obtained were the following: the learning is globally 30% of the vocabulary contained in the application, 30 of 90 words. Word articulation is improved 50%; in attention span, the period of attention increased from 3 to about 9 minutes.