A new Cued Speech Association - Cued Speech South Africa (CSSA) - has been founded by inspiring teacher Lynette Diederichs (who is herself deaf) and her husband Richard.
Lynnette works with primary school children at Kwa Thintwa School for the Deaf and initially was the only teacher using Cued Speech. In May 2008, Alan Davies, director of THRASS (UK) donated THRASS materials to the school, and requested a baseline assessment to be done prior to using their material. The two classes who had had the benefit of both Cued Speech and THRASS had scores which were over 25% higher than the other classes. The data of this baseline assessment as well as other data collated throughout the year of 2007, was presented by Lynnette at the 2nd Annual Absa - THRASS conference held in Johannesburg on the 28th January 2009.
The progress the children have made with the support of Cued Speech and the THRASS synthetic phonics programme has encouraged 97% of the staff to request lessons in Cued Speech. The Foundation Phase staff were the first to do the course but as these ‘newly cueing’ teachers are not yet fluent, Cued Speech is presently only being used fully in two classrooms. One of the enthusiastic ‘new’ teachers, who is also hearingimpaired and communicates in both speech and Sign (who was initially very anti-Cued Speech and did not want to do the course!) was astounded at the value of Cued Speech saying: “If only I had this in school!"
Parents are also learning but as Lynette writes: “the children only go home sporadically if at all during term time, so I do not have the privilege of daily home-base support and the language development that would flow from it.” Lynette tells us despite that, the young children are beginning to cue expressively and receive receptively with pleasing results.
“My Grade 3 continued to develop a better understanding of the English language and did particularly well comparatively in their reading and spelling, in conjunction with the THRASS chart. If only they had had access to both Cued Speech and THRASS from the start of their schooling - what a difference it would have made!"
