"WHO" AND "HOW" OF TADOMA

Who can benefit from the Tadoma method? Above all: who can learn how to use it? The answer is not easy. At the beginning, the system was set up for deafblind children and this area of multideficiencies even today seems the one where the application of the method can offer the biggest advantages.

In particular, the people suitable for Tadoma are the children who have both a hearing capacity too limited to be able to use the hearing aids, and a sight capacity insufficient to learn how to read lips or sign language.

The understanding of Tadoma, however, also needs good tactile discrimination skills.

In fact, the distinction of sounds and words is entirely based on the recognition of slight tactile differences, felt by the hand that "listens".

Such discriminative ability is usually found only in children that are not suffering from serious mental retardation. Therefore it’s necessary to be aware that this method can be difficult to learn for children who show very serious intellectual limits. Communication with the Tadoma method should be started as soon as possible.

From the first moments of the child’s life parents and other adults around him/her usually speak to him/her, smile at him/her, sing children’s songs and nursery rhymes to him/her; the child imitates, laughs at all the sound productions and he/she makes up his/her own, often equally naive and funny.

This sound environment has many necessary elements for the child to learn how to communicate. In the first place, he/she is offered models up to his/her capabilities: the parent saying "BABABAAA" hoping the child will imitate brings his/her way of communicating purposely nearer to the one the child can actually produce. Moreover we give very many social reinforcers any time the child makes an interesting sound. This makes the task of learning to communicate particularly amusing. Finally, language gives a kind of constant soundtrack in every child’s life; the adults speak to him/her all the time, giving him/her a starting point for learning new words, useful expressions and other interesting uses of the language.

The multihandicapped child has, qualitatively, the same need of stimulation through models and reinforcers. If anything, these stumuli should be greater if compared to what happens normally, to confront his/her sensory or psycho-sensory deficiencies.

However, due to a series of medical, social and psychological circumstances, it is more likely that such a child ends up in an extremely harmful situation of hypo-stimulation.

To avoid this occurring it is of vital importance to give communication opportunities from the very first days of life. The child can learn to "feel" the adults’ words by putting his/her little hands on the speaker’s face. The adults, then, should talk to this child at least as long as they would talk to someone that can see and hear. Gradually, as he/she grows, the child should be able to follow the conversations between two adults, by putting his/her hands on the two people’s faces at the same time. In this way he/she can be aware of how a normal conversation between two people takes place, with its time order, the alternation between the two speakers and so on. Let’s not forget, in fact, that people who see and hear take these things for granted ("It’s normal: we always do it!"). But those who can’t see and hear have to learn such "elementary" actions in another way.

Recurring words and sentences should be associated as much as possible to movements or actions that the child can clearly feel. For example, the teacher can play flying "aeroplanes" with the child by lifting him/her up and saying "UP IN THE AIR!!" and then taking him/her back on the ground saying :"DOWN ON THE GROUND!!". If you pay attention to always keep the child’s hand on your face, it will be easier for him/her to associate different words with the corresponding objects, actions or situations.