Is your child really a troublemaker or can they just not hear?

About 15% of pupils have impaired hearing which often gets misdiagnosed or interpreted as naughtiness.

- Citizen reporter

Here's what parents need to know about picking up hearing impairment in their children.

Johannesburg-based speech language therapist and audiologist, Venisha Naran, did a routine hearing screening for a Grade 1 pupil. The referral came with a brief.

"They said they didn't think there was anything wrong with her ears, but she had recently arrived from China and didn't understand much English," she says.

Naran screened the child. Then she screened her again to check her findings. She sent the little girl home with a note requesting a meeting with her parents: It wasn't the English that she was struggling with - she had hearing impairment.

Over the course of the pupil's school career, Naran fitted her with three sets of hearing aids.

Last year she passed matric in a mainstream school and is currently studying engineering.

"If it had not been picked up, they would have just always thought her learning issues were because of the second language when, in fact, she couldn't hear," says Naran.