AUDITORY VERBAL TRAINING - WORKSHOPS - CONSULTATIONS - MENTORING

For more than 40 years, Ellen Rhoades has served as a highly experienced Auditory Verbal practitioner, director, supervisor, trainer, coordinator, mentor, and consultant. She currently specializes in mentoring and training professionals to become LSLS Certified Auditory Verbal Therapists. You can bring Ellen Rhoades to your community for instructional seminars, training workshops, program evaluations, or agency/family consultations. We invite you to browse these pages and consider whether the Auditory Verbal approach is appropriate for you and the children you serve.

Auditory Verbal Practice...

Auditory Verbal Practice is proven to be a highly viable communication option for children with significant hearing loss. All over the world, these children have been learning how to hear, listen and speak. With cochlear implants and/or digital hearing aids, Auditory Verbal therapy has become the communication option of choice for the overwhelming majority of parents who have children with hearing loss. This is so, regardless of whether the children are hard of hearing or profoundly deaf.

Aside from having established and directed four different Auditory Verbal programs for families and their children with hearing loss, this consultant conducted and published the first longitudinal study demonstrating the viability of Auditory Verbal therapy. This study, involving 40 children and their families, demonstrated that deaf children could learn to understand and use spoken language at rates similar to those of typically hearing children. These children were successfully mainstreamed into the fabric of their respective communities and schools. 

Today, there is no need for children to be functionally deaf or delayed in language or literacy skills. Today, with all the hearing technology available to us, implementing Auditory Verbal practice should be the first option for our children. Today, we have the power to bring the Auditory Verbal approach to all of our clinics, school programs, and university training programs. Today, we can make the Auditory Verbal communication option accessible to every parent who prefers that their children with hearing loss become an integral part of our typically hearing and speaking communities.

Take advantage of the opportunity to learn how to implement Auditory Verbal practice at your location, whether it be your own home or educational/clinical program.

 

	Use a fast-track Auditory Verbal program based on this consultant’s Developmental AVT "road map" for infants, preschoolers, elementary school aged kids.
	Teach newly implanted teens and adults how to use their newfound hearing.
	Develop a telephone training program based on the Auditory Verbal approach.
	Implement successfully proven Auditory Verbal activities based on sound objectives, strategies, and techniques.
	Incorporate the concept of accountability based on this consultant’s language assessment protocol.
	Enable deaf children to develop "a listening attitude" that permits auditory-only speech discrimination scores of at least 70%-80%.
	Integrate hearing into deaf children’s personalities so that their rate of language development is accelerated, thereby becoming linguistically competent at a level commensurate with their typically hearing peers.

 

Just what is this Auditory Verbal communication option?

It is integrating hearing into the child’s personality so that the child becomes assimilated into our respective communities. It is promoting full inclusion of our children into their regular neighborhood school programs, from infancy across adolescence. It is both embracing and fostering a lifestyle that enables children, in spite of their deafness, to achieve their rightful places in our society. It is a means by which children with significant hearing loss are taught how to hear, how to listen, how to understand the language of their typically hearing parents, and how to effectively speak that same language. It is an approach enabling us to ensure that all of our children with hearing loss attain their birthright to spoken language and literacy. It is developing effective partnerships between practitioners and parents as well as strengthening the family unit.

It is more than a method or a bunch of techniques and strategies. Auditory Verbal practice significantly alters the concept and practice of schools and classroom programs for deaf children as they’ve existed for the past 150 years. The deaf child no longer need be relegated to a world of silence and illiteracy.

Click here to hear a message from Ellen about the Auditory-Verbal Approach.

AUDITORY VERBAL PRACTICE as defined by Ellen A. Rhoades, EdS, LSLS Cert. AVT: A systematic empirically-based positive family-centered, child-driven, objective-oriented intervention that is constructed on a naturalistic cognitively-oriented auditory comprehension-based developmental model. © 1999-2013, Ellen A. Rhoades, EdS, LSLS Cert. AVT