Newly available therapy gains popularity on Chinese mainland

Taiwan native and entrepreneur Kenny Cheng frequents the Chinese mainland, but not for sight-seeing or business.

Cheng is the president of the Taipei-based Children's Hearing Foundation, which has been cooperating with the China Rehabilitation and Research Center for Deaf Children since 2008 to promote auditory-verbal therapy on the mainland.

The foundation is the first and only organization worldwide that has transformed AVT from English into Mandarin, despite the great difference between the languages.

And it all springs from parental love.

Cheng's daughter, Alana, was born with severe hearing loss. After seeing her daughter's progress with AVT training in Australia, his wife, Joanna Nichols, decided to establish the Children's Hearing Foundation in Taiwan in 1996 to promote AVT and help families with similar problems.

"All parents are the same," Cheng says. "We all want the best for our children, and we felt obliged to promote AVT."

In the initial years, the foundation brought Chinese-Australian audiologists to help children adjust hearing aids and artificial cochleas to make the most of them, before localizing AVT by incorporating Mandarin features.

It also recruited volunteers to persuade parents to give AVT a try, and promoted the therapy to the deaf community.

"It requires energy and patience from parents," Cheng says.