Auditory Training: Its Features, Advantages and Disadvantages

Auditory training has become one of the most popular training systems not just for normal children and adults, but it also helps to enhance the learning potential of those children who are affected with severe learning and disability problems. Any type of auditory processing disorder can actually hamper the entire educational growth of your child, and in the process, the child’s overall academic performance gets hampered.

What are the features to be kept in mind while the auditory training goes on?

When an auditory training process goes on, certain steps have to be followed. These are summarized as under. There can be variations but generally these steps ensure a better understanding of auditory instructions, for those children who are unable to distinguish between different auditory sounds.

  • This training has to be performed only by a qualified and experienced teacher who is aware and sensitive to the difficulties of the young or an adult learner.
  • A distance of maximum three to four feet is to be maintained from the position of the teacher or the auditory training instructor. If the learner is sitting near to the teacher, he or she will be able to grasp things very easily and clearly.
  • Auditory training must be accompanied with small and large visual cues that can easily help the learner to understand their potential difficulties and they get the opportunity to rectify themselves.
  • Peer groups can help the learners to go through the process very easily as they can gesticulate and make the learner understand symbols, clues, directions and even small instructions.
  • The teacher needs to speak in a clear voice which has frequent modulations, so that the learner can understand the words and sounds of vowels and consonants, the rising and falling of tones and so on.
  • The class lessons must be previewed, reviewed and summarized after each class, so that the learner can easily relocate the terms, words, phrases and sentences that have been iterated in class.

What are the advantages of auditory learning?

Auditory training certainly has certain advantages. These are as follows:

  • It inculcates a well-developed learning and presentation skill in the learner, and the child or the adult is able to distinguish between tones, rising and falling sounds, noise, and they also understand the basic parameters of learning in a very effective and systematic manner.
  • Auditory training helps a child in role playing, in delivering dialogues out of a script, or to participate actively in group activities.
  • This can also help later in life in passive form of learning. For instance, a person may drive and listen to lectures at the same time.
  • It helps to educate all those children who are affected with ADHD along with hearing disability or those children who have severe learning disabilities as they cannot discern the meaning of words and are unable to hear them.

The disadvantages must not be overlooked either:

Along with the advantages, there are also certain forms of disadvantages of auditory training, as there are very few qualified and experienced instructors who can guide the child or take care of the learning disabilities of the child. Moreover, the entire auditory training process requires that the teacher uses systematic, clear and unobtrusive speech sounds so that the learner is able to understand the significance and sound of words. Phonetic skills along with the efficiency to use single and double syllables, word stress, word amplification and sentence construction has to be done in a proper manner so that the learner with learning difficulty is able to grasp the entire syllabus or the structure of the curriculum. For better results, it is always advisable to get certified and experienced professionals for auditory training.

This information ensures you a better understanding of auditory training instructions; Go through this link for more auditory commands.