The role of hearing aids in the development of spoken language of the hearing impaired students: a case study of deaf learners in a special school in Nyeri county-Kenya

The aim of this study was to investigate how hearing aids help the hearing impaired learners develop speech. The study was carried out in Kenya in a special integrated secondary school for the Hearing Impaired in Nyeri County. The research participants were high school students purposively selected based on the duration of using the HA. The school was chosen purposively as it was a public school for the HI and the hearing. The objectives of the study were: to enumerate the role of the HA in spoken language development, understand the impact of the speech in social interaction among the HI using the HA, understand how the HI using HA are assisted to develop speech and find out the factors that are necessary for the HI using HA to develop speech. The study adopted a qualitative approach. Data was collected using multiple methods like FGD with teachers, interviews with the HA users, document analysis and desktop research. Data analysis involved transcription of collected data, coding and categorising according to themes related to the research questions. Data was analysed after coding to generalise conclusions on the study findings. The study showed that learners had BTE HA and had personal ear moulds. Findings indicated that the learners were not always using the HA due to negative perceptions and they would use them depending on the prevailing conditions. Some had developed some speech though not very much intelligible indicating a need for speech training on top of fitting the HA. It is recommended that more efforts need to be geared towards training the HA users the listening and speaking as parameters for speech spoken language development