ALPC Belgium (Association pour la Langue Française Parlée Complétée Belgique) was created in 1984 from the alliance between parents of deaf children and professionals. The association’s objectives are the development and promotion of the French Cued Speech, LfPC (Langue Française Parlée Complétée). The main goals of ALPC Belgium are the diffusion of LfPC and its transmission.
The people we train and inform about this technique come from three categories: professionals-parents-friends close to deaf/hard-of hearing children. Among the future professionals, students in speech and language therapy play an important role.
Our main activity is to offer LfPC training on several levels during weekends. We also organise “à la carte” training courses (face-to-face or by videoconference) and summer internship weeks.
During events related to deafness, we organise information stands at various locations: Logopaedic and Deafness Fairs, World Deaf Day, invitations from specialised schools, multidisciplinary centres or mainstream education, etc.
A few examples of our objectives:
- Listening, guidance and support for the families of children with hearing impairment.
- Teaching the LfPC to parents, friends and professionals who are involved with the deaf or hard of hearing child.
- Organizing workshops and training for parents, children and professionals.
- Informing who have questions about the LfPC.
- Helping students to find participants for tests or references for their final assignments related to the LfPC.
- To disseminate knowledge and experience relating to the LfPC.
- To promote LfPC beyond the Belgian borders: we are currently the leaders of the European Erasmus+ Cued Speech Europa project .
LfPC allows full accessibility to the French language for deaf children. Indeed, lip-reading is incomplete. Many words have the same picture on the lips and some sounds are not visible on the lips.
Thanks to LfPC, a combination of the shapes and positions of the hand near the face, synchronized with lip reading, deaf people can get a complete message.
With this letter we would like to express our commitment to participate in the Comm4CHILD project (Communication for Hearing Impaired Children to Optimise Language Development).
Our commitment to the Comm4CHILD project can be seen as follows:
- ALPC Belgium will contribute to the training of two ESRs in LfPC,
- We will also help with the recruitment of participants in the context of the ESRs’ studiess.
- ALPC will help ESRs to disseminate their research to a wide range of people: families, speech therapists, teachers, educators, etc. via our website, newsletters and social networks (we currently have over 700 contacts).