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Speak Out
April 2015
Speech Pathology Australia
BRANCH news
victoria
Tam* was nine years old
when
Australian volunteer Peng-Sim Eng first
met him in April 2012. Highly anxious,
Tam had frequent tantrums and hit his
friends. He was labeled, together with
many other students at the Kianh Centre
special education facility in Hoi An,
Vietnam, as ‘not able to remember’ his
alphabets and numbers.
Peng had just arrived from her home
state of Victoria as an Australian
volunteer, funded by the Australian
Government as part of the Australian
Volunteers for International Development
(AVID) program, to work for two years at
the Kianh Centre as a special education
specialist.
Although in its infancy, the systematic
facilitation of special education in
Vietnam is improving. It was apparent to
Peng that her role would be to introduce
fundamental skills that would be useful
for the teaching staff at the Kianh Centre
to address the diversity of impairments
presented by the twenty-odd students.
“I wanted to deliver an effective training
program, so that teachers were better
able to understand the students as
individuals with specific needs and
abilities. To teach in ways that enabled
students to acquire functional skills
towards greater independence, and to
plan for classrooms with diverse abilities
and needs.”
Within a year of the training program,
Tam’s teacher made changes to her
teaching strategies which resulted in
more effective engagement and
learning.
Tam began using level one mainstream
textbooks. He was able to blend
alphabets to read simple Vietnamese
words, including diacritics. His
mathematical skills had improved
significantly and he could now execute
simple mathematical calculations.
“I found addressing the behavioural
and communication needs of students
especially challenging because these
were not viewed as educational
needs. The importance of expressive
communication had been overlooked
in favour of development of academic
and other skills. At that point,
expressive communication of verbally
impaired students was limited mainly
to body gestures and confirming or
negating questions and statements,”
said Peng.
“In the absence of support from
professional speech pathologists, in
June 2012 I worked with local staff to
initiate the systematic use of symbols
to augment the expressive
communication needs of students.”
To develop a system, selected staff
members at the centre identified culturally
important themes and vocabulary.
Culturally appropriate symbols were
designated to each word.
Staff and students trialled and identified
some of the most commonly used core
Vietnamese words to facilitate navigation
to other fringe vocabulary within the
system.
Australian volunteer Peng-Sim Eng with students at the Kianh Centre in Vietnam.
We can speak, even without a voice