The kindergarten children are making a racket beside the piano, singing at the top of their voices and waving their tiny hands in the air. But instead of making the teachers frown, the noise is welcomed. To a newcomer the classroom looks no different from any other - except that it is wired.
The room is not a venue for clandestine activity, however. It is a haven for deaf children like Ng Man-hung, aged six, who can now hear his own yawn and sing his favourite song in time and in tune. Because of a new hearing-aid system, he can also communicate with others, even if he is not facing them and cannot read their lips.
Teleloop, developed by Danish company Oticon, enables the deaf to pick up sounds that would normally be obscured by background noise with a traditional hearing device. In a 'wired' room, a cable is run along the walls and 'connected' to a cordless microphone used by the teacher, whose voice can be heard clearly by students wearing special hearing aids.
'Before, Man-hung could only hear 'oooozzzz' sounds when I called him from a distance and he couldn't see me,' says his mother Cat Ng So Kit-ling. 'But in the classroom he reacts almost instantly to what I say; it's unbelievable.' Her son's hearing is so good with the aid of the Teleloop that, she says, 'some people ask me why my son is wearing an aid; they cannot tell from his daily communication that he's deaf'.
Man-hung has been studying at Suen Mei Speech & Hearing Centre for the Deaf since he was 17 months old. For 62 children, aged from six months to six years, the school provides speech training and exercises to develop their cognitive ability and residual hearing.
Its director and headmistress, Bessie Pang Lau Seung-man, has taught the hearing-impaired since the 1970s. A pioneer in the field, she designs individual programmes for each student at Suen Mei, the only pre-school of its kind in Hong Kong.
'Parental involvement and tailor-made teaching programmes are all the more important for deaf children,' Mrs Pang says, 'and you see the encouraging results.' More than 93 children have been integrated into the mainstream curriculum since the school started in 1981.
