Have you ever wondered who lipreading classes are aimed at?
Have you ever wondered what goes on in a lipreading class?
Have you ever wondered if a lipreading class might be useful to you?
I hope to answer these questions and help you decide if you would like to join a class.
My name is Molly Berry, and I am a lipreading tutor, and vice chair of ATLA (the Association of Teachers of Lipreading to Adults).
I am profoundly deaf, but have a brilliant cochlear implant, with which I manage very well. I don’t sign, as I was not born deaf.
I started to lose my hearing in my thirties, and I wish someone had told me about lipreading classes!
Lipreading, and managing hearing loss classes, to give them their full title, are aimed at anyone, of any age, who struggles to hear in noise, whether they wear a hearing aid or not.
After getting a hearing test, joining a lipreading class is the best way to help yourself get the most from your hearing, and take charge of your own hearing loss.
So what goes on in a class? Lipreading is a complex skill, it takes time and practice to learn.
The aim is to get the gist of what is said, so that we can join in the conversation.
We are teaching the eyes to help the ears get the best from what they hear. Classes are small, friendly and fun.
We usually start by learning the lipreaders alphabet, and confusion groups, letters that look similar on the lips, these are the reason for some of the hilarious errors we sometimes make.
In a class we can laugh together, we all have hearing loss, and we can use these errors to learn from.
You will learn checking strategies, which are very important, tea on Saturday will look similar to dinner on Sunday, and you need to be sure which you have been invited to!
Classes will vary, but usually there will be short exercises and small group work, and a longer piece, to stretch concentration times and memory.
Lipreading isn’t the only thing you will learn in a class. You will learn about equipment and organisations to help you in your everyday life, about how hearing works and the things that can go wrong.
We look at audiograms and what they show, and learn about hearing aids and their care, BAHAs and CIs.
There is much more that you will learn in a class, but the first pleasure on joining is finding others with similar problems.
When I first started losing my hearing, I felt very alone and misunderstood. There was no sympathy, and I was often sure that people were laughing at me, it is so easy to lose confidence and become isolated, we tend to read a lot, not that that is a bad thing, but losing social contact is.
Research shows that it is best to join a class soon after being diagnosed with hearing loss, but any time is better than never, so go for it, do the best you can for yourself.
For information on classes nationwide taught by qualified tutors, go to the ATLA (The Association of Teachers of Lipreading to Adults) website at: www.atlalipreading.org.uk
Enjoying our eggs? Support The Limping Chicken:
The Limping Chicken is the world's most popular Deaf blog, and is edited by Deaf journalist, screenwriter and director Charlie Swinbourne.
Our posts represent the opinions of blog authors, they do not represent the site's views or those of the site's editor. Posting a blog does not imply agreement with a blog's content. Read our disclaimer here and read our privacy policy here.
Find out how to write for us by clicking here, and how to follow us by clicking here.
The site exists thanks to our supporters. Check them out below:
- BSL Zone: TV programmes in BSL for the Deaf community
- Deaf Umbrella: what support is available for deaf students?
- Bellman & Symfon: home alerting solutions, including the mobile phone transceiver!
- SignVideo: Instant BSL video interpreting online
- SignHealth: check out the BSL health library
- 999 BSL: call 999 in an emergency, in BSL
- Appa: Looking for RSLIs, TSLIs and CSWs, apply here!
- Signly: Adding BSL to websites
- Signworld: Learn BSL online!
- DCAL: world-class research into deafness, cognition and language
- Action Deafness: “A Deaf-Led Charity” – interpreting & community support services
- Sign Solutions: Instant access to Interpreters, training and BSL translation nationwide
- InterpretersLive: On demand BSL video interpretation
- Lipspeaker UK: specialist lipspeaking support
- BID: Deaf services, including advice and support, interpreting, employment and letters
- Performance Interpreting: BSL interpreting at concerts
- National Deaf Children's Society: The leading charity for deaf children
Edis Bevan
April 5, 2016
Lip reading is not a skill for deaf people only.
Mumble decades ago I learnt Spanish in evening classes. My ‘hearing world’ fellow students could not understand how I was picking up on meanings and even pronounciation faster than them.
I was just naturally watching the teachers lips and doing the automatic decodes of my normal life!
It would have been very helpful though to get tips from Spanish-speaking people skilled in lip-reading…
Maybe we should campaign to have lip-reading made an essential part of teaching foreign languages for everyone. Might raised the status of the skill, the prestige of its teachers, and the awareness of every anglophone of how to communicate when speaking English .
shelle02
April 5, 2016
Being deaf since birth and relying 100% on lipreading I was not really aware of how important this is until my Dad started losing a part of his hearing. Now in social situations I find that he is “deafer” than me, despite having way more hearing, simply because he cant lipread! Makes a huge difference for those who are gradually losing their hearing.
Hartmut
April 6, 2016
It is my experience from knowing many deafened adults that they are better lipreader than deafies, especially those who went deaf gradually. The best expalnation for this phenomenon is twofold: native knowledge of English, especially the pragmatics, and reverting to lipreading as you grow deaf bit by bit.
I also noticed CODAs to be excellent lipreaders. So are many sign language interpreters.
shelle02
April 6, 2016
Strange because my experience is the total opposite 🙂 Those that were deaf from birth or early childhood are better at it because it became a natural part of communication at school, and those who have gone deaf much later in life have never been taught how to lipread and thus struggle to pick it up.
Hartmut
April 7, 2016
Lipreading is mostly untaught and grows bit by bit, while growing up and as part of spoken language acquisition. It cannot be taught in classes. The classes are mostly supplementary to what you already do as part of receptive skill repertoire.
There was in the 1950’s a study by Dr Lowell in the USA comparing oral deaf adults with random selected hearing adults, running a silent film of a lady speaking 20 sentences silently. He found NO difference in lipreading accuracy between the two groups.
There are a couple of psycholinguistic studies of perception of spoken language, for example showing “dad” on the video and hearing “bad” or “gad” at the same time. Subjects tend to pick “dad”.
There can be individual differences among the people at both ends of the statisitcal bell curve, though. I am talking about the masses in the middle of the bell curve.
I can envision someone becoming deaf suddenly to have more difficulty to lipread, especially when he tends to look away from the speaking person. I also notice, hearing people understand my Deaf speech better when they look at me, NOT when they try to listen carefully with eyes to the ground.
shelle02
April 11, 2016
I guess I would have to disagree with you, but of course its only based on my own experience. I did learn in school, in classes and not as I was growing up. I learnt at an early age, how else would I receive an education? The study you are referring to (whilst being in the US rather than the UK) is based on hearing adults which I would imagine would produce different results to those of deaf adults (Or child). Anyhow, just my own experience 🙂
Hartmut
April 11, 2016
Dr Lowell study is based on a lipreading test of a random sample of hearing adults and a group of oral deaf adults who were known or claimed themselves to be very good lipreaders. The study employs a test of statistical significance. Dr Lowell, by virtue of being the director of an exclusively oral school, would be biased toward the claim that deaf people could function adequately in the hearing world by lipreading and would not need sign language. He wanted to show that if orally educated deaf persons are better than hearing people in lipreading, then the exclusively oral schooling is justified; the missing or lessened hearing could be compensated by lipreading. Anecdotes circulated then had him being very shocked to find that untrained hearing people on the average did not perform poorly against oral deaf lipreaders.
I grew up in Germany and can confirm Lowell’s conclusion there. I noticed too many hearing people to be better lipreader than myself, being one of better lipreaders than most in my deaf school. Then in the US, I noticed the same thing what Dr Lowell found ten years earlier..
Anne Jones.
September 29, 2016
I go to one of Molly’s lip-reading classes. They are really good, great fun, hard work and a great help, and attended by a group of us with varying degrees of hearing loss. Its good to talk with one another too…. comparing notes etc.