Materials provided by Brazil’s Ministry of Education: from the conceptions on language to linguistic policies for deaf education

Abstract

This article discusses Brazil’s federal government's linguistic policies through an analysis of the teaching materials provided for the formation of language teachers for deaf students. The research question is: what conception of language teaching predominated as an official policy throughout these materials? The objective is to describe, contextualize and analyze the linguistic policies proposed in these materials, pointing out the changes that have occurred according to their constitutive discourses. This research is centered on Bakhtin’s and Bakhtin Circle’s dialogical perspective of language, especially on Bakhtin’s (2016) and Volóchinov’s (2017) conception of language. The methodological procedures consisted of the contextualization of the educational policies applied to the editing of Brazil’s Ministry of Education’s four teaching materials published from 1979 to 2010 and the analysis of their official discourse based on the categorization of conceptions of language and linguistic policies. The results show that the first language policy, adopted from 1979 to 1995, based its conception of language in special education on speech and writing rehabilitation; from 1997 to 2002, the second policy based its teaching design on the grammars of Portuguese and the Língua Brasileira de Sinais  (LIBRAS) through signs, sentences and dialogues in context; the third policy, implemented from 2003 to 2010, was based on the development of reading skills and production of texts in Portuguese as L2 and Libras as L1; written Portuguese language and LIBRAS are correlated in the Specialized Educational Service (SES) field as a policy of inclusion in public teaching systems.