The Listening Child: What Can Go Wrong

About the Book

The struggle to survive in today’s noisy classrooms is real. The child’s poor performance often leads authorities to apply undue pressure on him, frequently concluding that he is lazy or of low intelligence, which is certainly not the case. The child’s brain is a complex storage and retrieval organ, which mandates that information be properly received, stored, and organized in order to be retrieved for proper use. The child who processes information normally in the classroom is constantly assigning meaning to what is being said in the classroom. The brain is capable of performing these functions in millisecond as long as there is a built-in attention filtering device that assists him in processing relevant information and filtering out or eliminating that which is not. The child who has processing difficulties is not equipped with the excellent filtering capabilities of the normal processing child. His primary difficulty is that of learning through a defective auditory (hearing) channel. Unlike the normal listener, he cannot make maximum use of what he hears for academic purposes even though his hearing is normal. Something seems to intercept the information between what he hears with the normal ear and its decoding by the brain. He allows in both relevant and irrelevant information all at once. Because of poor storage and retrieval capabilities as well, this results in inadequate receptive expressive and integrative functioning on the part of the child. You may often hear him say to the teacher, “I forget.” “What did you say?” “Would you repeat that?” “I don’t understand” The Listening Child explains in layman’s terms what teaches and what parents need to know out this child’s difficulty.

About the Author

Stephen V. Prescod was audiologist-in -chief for the Ministry of Health, for the North Okanagon Health Unit in the province of British Columbia, Canada, before accepting a position with King Saud University, Riyadh, in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Here he assisted in coordinating the undergraduate program in Speech and Hearing Sciences for students preparing for an advance degree overseas in the field. He is a certified member of the American Speech Language and Hearing Association (ASLHA) and the College of Audiologists and Speech Pathologist of Ontario (CASLPO). Prescod’s background includes an assistanceship at the State University of New York, a visiting lecturer at Conestoga College, Ontario, an associate professor, Andrews University in Michigan, and King Saud University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in the Department of Rehabilitation Sciences. Prescod holds an MA degree in education and an MA in clinical audiology. He has a PhD from the State University of New York in diagnostic audiology. He has contributed to several books and journals in the field of education and audiology. His latest work, The Listening Child: What Can Go Wrong, addresses the problem confronting those children with learning disorders of one sort or another in regard to the processing of information under less than favorable learning conditions for them. Here, auditory processing disorders are written for the first time in a language primarily for parents and teachers to understand, with recommended suggestions and strategies and identification protocols for all to utilize.