Surdez, linguagem e educação: quem ouve o sujeito surdo?

Abstract

This work aims at researching how the written Portuguese second-language acquisition process takes place when it comes to deaf students enrolled in regular public schools. It is a field research that used questionnaires to characterize the profile of the subjects involved in the teaching-learning process. The methodology follows a microethnographic approach that focuses on how things happen rather than what happens. The data gathering step encompassed a) a questionnaire for the deaf students in order to define their profile and their impressions about the teaching of written Portuguese; b) a questionnaire for the teachers in order to define their profiles and the problems they come across when teaching; c) once-a-week classroom observation in each school; d) register in a field diary. The sample was chosen encompassing students taking the three high-school years and their two Portuguese teachers in two public schools in the city of Santarém, in Pará State. The corpus analysis aimed at researching about the factors that help deaf students to learn and those that hinder their learning. We focus on the knowledge teachers have about teaching methodologies for the deaf, their knowledge about the Brazilian Sign Language (LIBRAS), the resources used in the classroom, the students’ impressions about how the Portuguese language is taught and, last, on the interaction that happens in the process. As theoretical background we rely on the Interactionism Approach in its two sub-approach that characterizes it: the interaction hypothesis and the social and cultural theory, the latter based on Vygotsky’s view on language acquisition. The data and its analysis give us evidence that deaf students are not in fact included in the regular school, since they are excluded from the teachinglearning process. In order to change this, deaf students have to be active in their own formation process. We conclude that changes in formation and, therefore, in the teachers’ view concerning the deaf student insertion are necessary. What we can see now is that formation, interaction and their fully-development conditions are denied to them.