Objective: The goal of this study was to evaluate the lip reading ability and Speech perception of hearing impaired students of special schools for the hearing impaired in different speech levels.

Materials & Methods: In this cross- sectional study, 44 deaf students (9-12 years old) were selected with multi-stage cluster sampling method, from two special schools for the deaf in Tehran. Tools were a demographics questionnaire, the Auditory Perception Test (APT-HI), Sara lip reading test (No 2) and Speech Discrimination Score Test (SDS). T test were used to analyze the data.

Results: The lip reading ability and speech perception of 97.3% of deaf students was very poor and only 67% had degrees of speech perception. (P-value<0.001). There was the significant difference between Sara lip reading test scores (phonemes) with and without sound (P-value<0.001), but no significant difference between SDS test scores (words) with and without sound. Also there was no significant difference between male and female sample scores in all of tests.

Conclusion: lip reading and speech perception, the first index of oral method, were not desirable in deaf students in special schools for the deaf in Tehran. More research is needed to explore solutions.