Material didático visual no ensino de inglês como língua adicional para estudantes surdos

Abstract

The debate about the education of the deaf has increasingly received attention in academia and media. As a result, important advances have been reached in terms of legislation on the rights of deaf people. For example, in the language field, the Brazilian Sign Language was recognized as the first language for the purposes of communication and teacher education for the teaching of deaf students (BRASIL, 2002, 2005). The teaching of additional languages in this context, especially the English language, is not covered by any specific legislation and, thus, it is regulated by the National Law of Directives and Bases for Education, which establishes that English shall be taught as a subject from the sixth grade of elementary school on (BRASIL, 1996). Besides the lack of directives for the teaching of English for the deaf, we also identified scarcity of studies about the production of learning materials for this target audience. From these considerations, we developed visual learning material, based on Systemic Functional theory (HALLIDAY; MATTHIESSEN, 2014) in order to help students with the formation of vocabulary in English as an additional language to the Brazilian Sign Language. The activities were developed in a special education public school in Rio Grande do Sul State from April to December 2017. The results show that the students used the material as a resource for doing other activities in the English classes and were very welcoming to our proposal. Additionally, along the period, they obtained better grades in evaluative tasks.