The student with a hearing impairment may be hard to recognize in the classroom.
Some students use hearing aids and have learned to lip-read or sign.
A person with nonfunctional hearing is deaf. In most cases, the English skills of a person who is deaf will be deficient. Impairments An estimated 15 million Americans have some degree of hearing loss. Two million five hundred thousand Americans are congenitally deaf or lost their hearing before the age of five. Not all people with hearing impairments are good lip readers.