Economically Disadvantaged

According to a report published by the National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP), a 2016 American Community Survey estimates that forty-one percent of children under eighteen years of age live in low-income households and of those, nineteen percent are classified as poor.¹ Low income is defined as at or above 200 percent of the federal poverty level - which in 2016, was set as $24,339 for a family of four.²

But how does hearing have anything to do with low-income levels or poverty?

Hart and Risely Study

In 1995, Drs. Betty Hart and Todd Risely at the University of Kansas carried out a unique long-term investigation of the direct effects of home experiences on children's development. They looked at the verbal interactions between parents and their children and analyzed monthly, one-hour tape recordings taken from the age of about 10 months to three years.

Forty-two families were involved in this study, each classified into three main groups. The first group was defined as Professional Families where parents were college professors. The second group was defined as Working Class Families, and the third was defined as Families on Welfare Support; i.e., low income families.

Hart and Risley's first main findings were of progressive differences in the language abilities of the children from the three types of home backgrounds. Although all children started to speak at about the same time, those from Professional Families demonstrated significantly higher cumulative vocabulary (number of different words used) than the other two classes of families. By age three, children from the Professional Families used about 1,100 words; from the Working Class Families about 750 words; and from the Welfare Families just above 500 words.³

The most astonishing results showed how many words the children in each social class heard. In Professional Families, children heard an average of 2,153 words per hour; in Working Class Families 1,251 words per hour and in welfare families only 616 words per hour.⁴ Extrapolating these figures to cover 4 years of experience (the number of years before kindergarten) yields 11 million words heard by a child in a professional family, 6 million for a child in working class family and 3 million for a child in a welfare family.⁵

Therefore, it can be interpreted that children from poverty receive only 20% of the early verbal stimulation compared to their middle class peers. All three classes of children attended kindergarten on the same day. But, the children from the professional class had heard 8 million more words by that point, preparing them for words that they would encounter when listening and learning to read in school. This relates to hearing and academic success in two important ways.

Auditory Stimulation and Cognitive Closure

First, auditory stimulation is linked to neurological development. Carol Flexer, University of Akron, has studied the learning and listening styles of urban children. She reported how all children are rich in "auditory designated neural tissue" but this tissue needs to be stimulated in order to grow and develop.⁶ This is particularly important if children have not been exposed to sufficient early verbal stimulation before beginning school.⁷ The importance of verbal (auditory) stimulation cannot be over-emphasized. Enhanced teacher communication in early elementary school is essential to fill this gap.

Secondly, cognitive closure is the ability to fill in the auditory "gaps" using the language database that has already been created and is stored in our brains. Think of it as library that houses words instead of books. When we don't hear everything that is said and part of a word or the entire word is missing, our brains automatically pull from that library to fill in the missing piece. If the shelves in that 'library' are empty or partially filled because a child has not been exposed to a lot of conversation and language use, the gap is less likely to be closed; hence, cognitive closure is more difficult to achieve and the child misses learning from that speech. If a child has had a lot of exposure to words and how they can be used, then the chances of automatically 'completing' the missing piece is increased.

Recent studies in brain development show that stimulation of the auditory centers of the brain is critical (Berlin & Weyand, 2003; Boothroyd, 1997; Chermak & Musiek, 1997; Sharma, Dorman, & Spahr, 2002; Sloutsky & Napolitano, 2003).⁸ Anything that can be done to stimulate the important centers in the brain increases a child's opportunity for auditory learning, literacy, and higher level academic success.

Learning Disabled

The term "learning disabled" is an umbrella term used to describe children with neurologically-based processing problems that interfere with their ability to learn. The regulations for Public Law (P.L.) 101-476, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), formerly P.L. 94-142, the Education of the Handicapped Act (EHA), define a learning disability as a "disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes involved in understanding or in using spoken or written language, which may manifest itself in an imperfect ability to listen, think, speak, read, write, spell or to do mathematical calculations."⁹

"In 2018-19, the number of students ages 3-21 who received special education services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) was 7.1 million, or 14 percent of all public school students. Among students receiving special education services, 33 percent had specific learning disabilities."¹⁰

Otitis Media (Middle Ear Infections) and Learning Problems

Studies have examined the incidence of ear infections among the learning disabled population. The learning disabled population was found to be twice as likely to have current and early incidence of ear infections than their non-learning disabled peers.¹¹ "Based on prevalence studies, educators can expect approximately one in four elementary level children identified by schools as learning disabled to have experienced recurrent episodes of otitis media." ¹² Recurring ear infections has been linked to compromised intellectual development among other problems with speech and language delays and psychoeducational and psychosocial development.¹³

Auditory Processing Disabilities (APD)

When auditory information is blocked, garbled, or delayed on its way to the brain it interferes with the processing of the auditory signals that the ear has detected. This is referred to as an auditory processing disability and it prevents the listener from understanding or interpreting what is heard.

Children with ADP do not have a hearing loss. Their ears capture the sounds perfectly, but their brain does not process the information fast enough or correctly to make sense of what they are hearing. It may not only affect the information entering into their brain, but the storage, organization, and retrieval of that information to get it back out. An estimated five percent of school-age children in the US have APD.¹⁴ But, symptoms can be easily overlooked or misdiagnosed so the true prevalence may be understated.

Children with this type of disability may have difficulty discriminating subtle differences in sounds, called phonemes, or they may have difficulty distinguishing individual phonemes as quickly as other children their age. To these children, the consonants 'd' 't' 'v' 'b' all sound the same. They may hear certain sounds in the middle of the word, but ignore the sounds at the end or beginning of the word. For example: instruction, destruction, construction, all sound the same. So does potato and tomato. So the child learns to use these words interchangeably and incorrectly in their own language. Sounds also tend to get re-organized because they are not being processed fast enough. For example, a child with APP may hear the word FIST as FITS. Digits in numbers may also get reordered. Speech and language impairments are the natural byproduct of the auditory processing disorder, and learning to read is extremely difficult.

The Importance of Enhanced Classroom Hearing

Classroom acoustics are extremely detrimental. A noisy classroom obscures the enunciation of words, making it increasingly difficult to discriminate sounds and identify what the teacher and their peers are saying. In some cases, when the child acknowledges that he heard the teacher, both child and teacher do not realize that the child heard something, but not correctly. This can be more damaging than not hearing it at all, because the child (oblivious to the problem) has learned something that's incorrect and does not make sense.

Preferential seating is usually recommended, but this will not help when the teacher is moving about the classroom or other students in the room are speaking. "Children with learning disabilities, language disorders, and auditory/attentional processing problems all have learning strategies that impair to one degree or another their ability to perceive or use acoustic signals in the classroom."¹⁵ Therefore these children have difficulty paying attention which may cause them to act out their behavior or withdraw. Those who act out mistakenly get labeled with a behavioral problem or ADHD. "Often the inattention is derived from the fact that the desired signal is masked to some degree by surrounding ambient noise, or aspects of the signal simply are not loud enough to reach audibility."¹⁶

Inattentiveness may also result from fatigue. Children with APD and other learning disabilities exert much more mental and physical stamina in trying to neurologically process what they hear than their peers. The child with a processing problem uses significantly more energy to listen, understand, store, and retrieve information. When that energy is exhausted, they "tune out".

Those classified as Learning Disabled encompass a variety of behavioral and learning issues that manifest themselves in different ways. However, all of these children have issues that may make it difficult to focus their attention, control their behavior, maintain self-esteem, and most importantly - perform to the level of their true ability. Poor acoustics exacerbates these problems. These children need the optimal classroom environment to remain on task and to increase their ability to understand the verbal instruction.

English Language Learners

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, as of fall 2015, US public schools had close to five mission English language learners (ELLs) representing nearly 10 percent of the student population.¹⁷

ELLs is a broad term used to describe students who have limited English proficiency. Two-thirds of the ELL students are in the elementary grades (K-5), with the remaining one-third in grades six through twelve.¹⁸

Hearing plays an extremely important role in academic success. Poor acoustics in our classrooms deny children with immature auditory capabilities acoustic accessibility. The impact for children who speak a language other than English and have minimum English proficiency is even more devastating. These children have limited knowledge of the English language and the various sounds that make up that language. They have no stored linguist information to pull from and from which to make comparisons. Cognitive closure is more difficult to achieve.

Numerous research studies have found that adult listeners for whom English is a second language (ESOL) often experience greater speech-perception difficulties than their native English speaking counterparts, particularly in a degraded listening environment.¹⁹ If ELL adults are experiencing more speech perception difficulties, it would be reasonable to assume that children, who by nature have greater speech perception needs due to immature neurological auditory abilities, would also have more difficulty as an ELL. These adult related findings have significant implications for our ELL students, highlighting the importance of a quieter environment and a louder and clearer teacher voice. In 1996, Carl Crandell examined the speech-perception abilities of twenty native English-speaking children and twenty nonnative English-speaking children under commonly reported classroom signal to noise ratios. Results from this investigation reported the non-native English group performed significantly poorer at signal to noise ratios ranging from +3 to -6 decibels.²⁰

Therefore, ESOL children exhibit greater speech perception difficulties than English speaking children; and thus, require a quieter environment in which to learn. The teacher's voice needs to be louder and clearer in order to emphasize the phonemes that are the building blocks of the English language.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that students need to be able to hear their teacher and their peers clearly in the classroom to maximize the benefits of verbal instruction. Reducing classroom noise and increasing the volume and clarity of the teacher's voice can benefit all. But for those students who already have additional learning needs, such as those from low-income families, those with a learning disability, or those who do not yet speak English proficiently, these hearing requirements are more than a benefit. They are a necessity.