This review is conducted to describe how children who are deaf or hard of hearing (D/HH) interact with hearing peers in inclusive settings, illustrate the difficulties and challenges faced by them in interacting with peers, and identify effective interventions that promote their social interaction in inclusive education. A systematic search of databases and journals identified 21 papers that met the inclusion criteria. Two broad themes emerged from an analysis of the literatures, which included processes and outcomes of interactions with peers and intervention programs. The research indicates that children who are D/HH face great difficulties in communicating, initiating/entering, and maintaining interactions with hearing peers in inclusive settings. The co-enrollment and social skills training programs are considered to be effective interventions for their social interaction. Communication abilities and social skills of children who are D/HH, responses of children with normal hearing, and the effect of environment are highlighted as crucial aspects of social interactions. In addition, future research is needed to study the interaction between children who are D/HH and hearing peers in natural settings, at different stages of school life, as well as improving social interaction and establishing an inclusive classroom climate for children who are D/HH.

The advancement of inclusive educational provision in the Asia-Pacific region has been guided by international research. As one example, Hong Kong has developed a unique and cultural response to inclusive practice within the region. This paper reviews Hong Kong's development of inclusive education practice for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). It provides an account of how services in education have developed for Chinese children with ASD, from diagnosis to school placement, and how the students are supported. A number of challenges for the region are discussed including those related to pedagogy, mentoring, placement, support and the need for culturally appropriate professional learning.This review was undertaken by identifying research from an exploration of four electronic repositories, ProQuest,

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It is possible that many benefits may be found for all concerned in education and child development in understanding how knowledge of the brain and its development can inform early years practice. This article, written by Brenda Peters and Chris Forlin, both from the Hong Kong Institute of Education, reviews literature based on neuroscience to establish potential links with teaching and learning, in an attempt to identify the most appropriate pedagogical support for children with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD). Two key themes have emerged: firstly, neuroscience and education and translation between these disciplines, and secondly, the relevance of these developments for specific groups of learners. This article focuses on early educational intervention and how emerging evidence from neuroscience and collaboration with educators may support future developments for practice for these young learners with ASD.

Advances in speech technology have made it possible to use speech as an effective man-machine interface in information retneval applications. We believe that since it is among the most natural means of communication, limited use of speech should increase the speed and ease of access to large document databases. The purpose of this paper is to descnbe a two-year research programme which involved the design, implementation and evaluation of a speech interface for the British Library Blaise online service The project began by examining an existing pnmitive voice interface which was developed during the early 1980s for an in-house text retneval system known as MicroBIRD. Evaluation of this interface has provided invaluable insights into the problems of voice interface design for online searching. The main lessons learned from this initial study were: (a) take full advantage of the well defined syntax of the query language to limit the difficulty of the speech recognition process; and (b) avoid antagonising the user by providing full control of the configuration of the interface, enabling varying degrees of audio reinforcement of visually presented data.Based on the experience gained from the MicroBiRD interface we embarked on the more challenging task of designing a speech interface for the Blaise system. We will outline the hardware configuration, software development, analysis of the Blaise query language syntax and design features of the new interface.Having successfully developed the system the next logical step was to study the reactions of users to the interface. particularly in relation to the preferred mix of keyboard/voice input and screen/speech output. We have carried out a series of expenments using subjects from a wide range of backgrounds. The evaluation expenments have shown that the use of voice for the input of commands and associated parameters is the area of greatest advantage of a voice interface. Indeed voice input is almost as fast as keyboard input, and sometimes slightly faster. Speech output, on the other hand, should be used pnmanly for providing short prompts (e.g. help messages) to the user. The reading out of an entire bibliographic record would be irksome and, because of the senal nature of speech. far too slow. If speech output is desired it should be limited to selected parts of a record such as author and title fields.Finally. our results have also shown that currently available speech recognition and synthesis hardware, along with intelligent software, can provide an interface well suited to the needs of online information retrieval systems.