1. Introduction
As part of a programme designed to identify and meet service provision needs in Brazil, a low cost tool developed in
Zimbabwe (Wirz et al., 2001) to identify hearing impairment in children was utilized. Once deafness is identified, an
appropriate service delivery plan is needed to support them and their families. This paper reports on the development of
tools for assessing communication skills which would be the first stage of a programme of intervention. In particular, the
researchers sought to develop an assessment protocol of children’s communication abilities which would be reliable,
regardless of whether children used spoken language (SpL) or signed language (SL).
In Brazil the communication assessment is problematic because there are limited tools which can be used to do this. The
challenge is further complicated by the fact that some of the children will be sign language users and others will be aspiring