and their community and carers. Is the aim of education to enhance communication generally, to develop sign language as a first language, or to develop skills in the spoken language of the hearing community? Researchers now focus on which aspects of language and communication may be best delivered by what means and in which contexts, given the hearing status of the child and her family, and their educational plans. Bimodal bilingualism (proficiency in both speech and sign language) is one dominant current approach in language education for the deaf child. Deaf people are often better lip-readers than people with normal hearing. Some deaf people practice as professional lipreaders, for instance in forensic lipreading. In deaf people who have a cochlear implant, pre-implant lip-reading skill can predict post-implant (auditory or audiovisual) speech processing. For many deaf people, access to spoken communication can be helped when a spoken message is relayed via a trained, professional lip-speaker. In connection with lipreading and literacy development, children born deaf typically show delayed development of literacy skills which can reflect difficulties in acquiring elements of the spoken language. In particular, reliable phoneme-grapheme mapping may be more difficult for deaf children, who need to be skilled speech-readers in order to master this necessary step in literacy acquisition. Lip-reading skill is associated with literacy abilities in deaf adults and children and training in lipreading may help to develop literacy skills. Cued Speech uses lipreading with accompanying hand shapes that disambiguate the visemic (consonant) lipshape. Cued speech is said to be easier for hearing parents to learn than a sign language, and studies, primarily from Belgium, show that a deaf child exposed to cued speech in infancy can make more efficient progress in learning a spoken language than from lipreading alone. The use of cued speech in cochlear implantation for deafness is likely to be positive. A similar approach, involving the use of handshapes accompanying seen speech, is Visual Phonics, which is used by some educators to support the learning of written and spoken language. Teaching and training The aim of teaching and training in lipreading is to develop awareness of the nature of lipreading, and to practice ways of improving the ability to perceive speech 'by eye'. Lipreading classes, often called lipreading and managing hearing loss classes, are mainly aimed at adults who have hearing loss. The highest proportion of adults with hearing loss have an age-related, or