Conversation Made Easy: Speechreading and Conversation Strategies Training for Adults and Teenagers With Hearing Loss (2002).
Conversation Made Easy: Speechreading and Conversation Strategies Training for People With Hearing Loss (2002).
By Nancy Tye Murray. Central Institute for the Deaf, 4560 Clayton Avenue, St. Louis, MO 63110. $399/set, $150/section (each CD-ROM set includes a manual and three sections). Reviewed by Elizabeth Ying, Indianapolis, IN.
Conversation Made Easy is a CD-ROM instructional program designed to facilitate speechreading skills in children and adults who are hearing impaired. The program is divided into three sections: sounds, sentences, and everyday situations. Individual lessons are organized into units of stimulus prompts, affording a closed set of response options. Immediate feedback regarding the accuracy of response is provided, obligating either a novel stimulus or a request for repetition or clarification. This process is ultimately intended to teach strategies for effectively and efficiently repairing communicative breakdown. Given an error response, the student has the option of selecting from an appropriate clarification strategy, ranging from an exact repetition of the target to a simplification of the original prompt.
The software permits the student to receive a printout of his or her performance. This structure permits this instructional program to be useful as a carry-over home reinforcement program of skills targeted within direct service therapeutic settings. The author, in turn, intended this program to be applicable to both individual and group therapy programming.
In general, this instructional program has widespread usefulness for the intended population. Given that stimulus prompts can be presented under optimal conditions (with both auditory and visual cues) and/or visual only, it has great promise for affording practice to individuals recently fitted with cochlear implants.
An unexpected diagnostic benefit of its “mode of presentation” would be that it could assist in determining the nature and/or extent of auditory enhancement afforded by a cochlear implant.
To date, there are few, if any, “functional” aural rehabilitation programs for adults. The “everyday situations” scenarios present real-life interactions, which afford both children and adults with practice in realistic contexts with meaningful stimuli (which they can conceivably generalize to their own experiences). The stimuli within the sentence section require a level of information processing that reflects reasoning skills at the comprehension level. Traditionally, sentence-level practice in existing aural rehabilitation programs affords only discrimination- or identification-level practice.
The interactive nature of all of the sections of this program lends itself to independent and/or home practice, which is critically needed in order to generalize skills targeted within communication training to real-life interactions.
For the more competent communicator, the program might be “slow.” There is no way to scan the program for a particular lesson, nor can unnecessary second repetitions be overridden. More systematic organization within the sound-level section (moving from gross contrasts to more refined contrasts) might have been more functional than the present structure of this section. Still pictures, graphics, and video stimuli are appealing and motivating to the ages for which the program was intended.
I have utilized the program with teenagers and older children who have received cochlear implants after having been dependent upon a manual sign system. Their restricted vocabulary, language, and phonemic awareness skills did not penalize them in utilizing this program. Quite the contrary, the linguistic complexity of the stimulus prompts was considered appropriate in introducing novel vocabulary and syntactic forms for a wide range of functional topics.