Infant literature and multimodality in the context of deafness: a proposal for action

Abstract

Several studies show the difficulties encountered by deaf subjects in their educational process. Educational practices based only on orality, with the illusory idea that this represents a prerequisite for learning the written language are recurrent. Actions of this kind lead to the lack of a shared language between hearing teacher and deaf student in the classroom, a factor that added to the absence of necessary and appropriate teaching materials for deaf students, further complicates these students access to literacy and learning. On the opposite of this view, it is considered that the educational process of the deaf should happen through meaningful interactions in sign language, respecting their non-hearing/speaking condition. In this sense, the educational process goes beyond the execution of decontextualized and mechanical activities conducted only through oral language and begins to respect the need of the deaf of learning in their own language, which helps in the acquisition of written language and minimizes their difficulties in reading comprehension and text production. To make this possible, we propose the incorporation of multimodality to therapeutic and educational practices for deaf people, using infant literature classical texts with deaf children as a target group in the process of written language acquisition.