A Comprehensive Plan for Delivery of Services for Hearing Impaired Children and Adults in the State of Mississippi (review)

Reviews A Comprehensive Plan for Delivery of Services for Hearing Impaired Children and Adults in the State of Mississippi, Richard G. Brill, Ed.D., 213 pp., no price given, The Conference of Executives of American Schools for the Deaf, Inc., 814 Thayer Avenue, Silver Spring, Md. 20910,1979. Dr. Brill, as project director, has put together a clear and comprehensive plan for the statewide delivery of educational and related support services for hearing-impaired children and adults in the state of Mississippi. This plan was the result of a special study commissioned by the 1978 session of the Mississippi Legislature However, this plan focuses on five areas of concentration : search, evaluation and placement; educational services—pre-school through secondary ; postsecondary programs; professional preparation; and, community services. The plan takes into account all the differences and needs in hearing-impaired children and adults and provides for a continuum of services available at varying age levels. What is needed right now is for the state of Mississippi at the decision-making level in the various agencies and groups concerned to study the recommendations of the plan and to work together to implement changes. If this is not the case, this plan will probably gather dust in a file or on a shelf, as is true with so many other studies and plans in the past. Edward E. Corbett, Jr., Ph.D. Assistant Superintendent Maryland School for the Deaf Frederick and Columbia, Md. Clinical Implications of Speech Discrimination Testing Using Nonsense Stimuli, Bradly J. Edgerton, Ph.D. and Jeffrey L. Danhauer, Ph.D., 90 pp., $6.95, University Park Press, 233 East Redwood St., Baltimore , Md. 21202,1979. This monograph provides a comprehensive review of the substantive literature in the development of speech discrimination material and a critical examination of the diagnostic efficiency of traditional clinical speech discrimination tests. Also considered are the attempts to resolve the inadequacies of monosyllabic word tests which led to the presentation of a rationale for and development of a nonsense stimuli test (NST) that has diagnostic significance and is relatively easy to score. Following a thorough description of the experiments leading to the establishment of two equivalent 25-item nonsense CVCV lists (NST Lists A, B) in Section II, the diagnostic and rehabilitative utility of the NST is discussed in Section III. Covered in this section about clinical applicability are: diagnostic sensitivity and the articulation-gain function for hearingimpaired vs. normal subjects, aural rehabilitation implications related to phonemic errors on the NST, determining differences between hearing aids, measuring speechreading skills and combined audiovisual skills, and gaining insight into phoneme perception by hearingimpaired individuals. The authors conclude with a brief discussion of implications for future research. Clinical Implications of Speech Discrimination Testing Using Nonsense Stimuli should serve as a valuable text in graduate courses in audiology and related disciplines. Vk S. Gladstone, Ph.D. Towson State University Baltimore, Md. 21204 Teacher's Guides: An Adaptation for Teachers of Hearing Impaired Children and Other Children Who Need Special Help, Sister Mary Kraemer, OSF., 91 pp., to accompany THE NEW LIFE PROGRAM, William H. Sadlier, Inc., New York, N.Y. Teaching religion to the deaf is a challenge requiring dedicated, love-filled teachers who desire to impart their love for God to their hearing -impaired students. Along with their own personal qualities, much special preparation, imagination, and creativity are essential ingredients for planting the seeds of Christian belief and values. Sister Mary Kraemer, in her adaptation of the lesson plans for the Sadlier THE NEW LIFE PROGRAM, (Book I, Our Father; Book II, Christ Our Life; Book III, Jesus Our Lord) presents some of the needs of religion teachers of hearingimpaired children by focusing in on the "Principles of Teaching Religion to the Deaf" (Teacher's Guide for Our Father, Book 1, pp. 4-5). Given the immensity of the task, Sister Kraemer has taken one great step desired by so many religion teachers of the deaf; namely, the preparation of adapted lesson plans and guides for an already published and readily available religion series. Materials, books, and lesson plans are now available to meet this often796 A.A.D. I October 1981 ...