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In the
video we see children at Kwa Thintwa School for the Deaf in Durban, South Africa
being taught using THRASS with Cued Speech. For many of the children their home
language is Zulu.
The video,
which was filmed in March 2009, begins with Lynette Diederichs, co-founder of
Cued Speech South Africa and a teacher at the school, telling us how she has
been more fortunate than many children at the school in that, prior to losing
her hearing when she was aged 9, she had hearing in one ear and so had a firm
language base on which to work and was able to carry on more or less as normal
in the hearing world. But even then she was not able to distinguish between some
sounds.
We see
Lynette working with the children with their THRASS Picture Charts and
phoneme-grapheme cards. She tells us how she discovered Cued Speech and we see
her demonstrating to the children how much easier the cues make it for them to
distinguish between sounds that look the same on the lips. She is also teaching
other staff at the school Cued Speech.
Lynette
explains the advantage of Cued Speech over sign language. Sign language will
always be the first language of the deaf if they just wish to communicate with
each other but the real advantage of Cued Speech is that it enables the deaf to
communicate with hearing people, the majority of whom don’t know sign language.
And a child brought up from birth with Cued Speech has the same depth of
understanding of language as a hearing child.
We then see
Grade 6 children actually using the THRASS Phoneme Machine with Cued Speech for
the first time. They are working with the interactive English Calendar Chart
with Cued Speech and they are very amused when Lynette discovers that she has
actually been been wrongly cueing one
letter name for years.
They are particularly enjoying working with the Phoneme Machine because it is on
a computer.
Kwa Thintwa
school was opened in 1981 by the late Archbishop Denis Hurley because at that
time there was no education for the black deaf in South Africa. Kwa Thintwa
means “to be touched” and the school promotes the spirit of goodwill, learning,
kindness and charity which permeates the atmosphere in the school.
 Watch the videostream
by just clicking on the link.
THRASS at Kwa Thintwa
or Download the 250MB WMV
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THRASS at Kwa Thintwa
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