Teaching Portuguese as a second language for the deaf

reflections from the lens of multimodality and the historical cultural perspective

Abstract

Deaf education has been discussed and debated throughout history, moving between different spaces and spheres of research activity. Among these debates is the teaching of Portuguese for the deaf – a subject so complex because it reveals not only theoretical-methodological perspectives, but also makes evident the threshold of two dualities that are tensioned in the classroom space: the oral language (Portuguese) and the visual language (Libras), with modalities that differ and contrast. In the wake of this debate, this article seeks to reflect on the practice of teaching Portuguese to deaf students, bringing contributions from the multimodality approach (Kress, 2010; Kress and van Leeuwen, 2001) and Vygotsky's historical-cultural perspective (1983, 1994, 2007, 2011). The work presents a bibliographical review with critical views and illustrates a didactic proposal involving reading and writing in Portuguese with deaf students. Our reflections point towards teaching Portuguese from a second language perspective, which considers sign language for the construction of knowledge, in addition to creating a linguistic environment where visuality and interaction are present and, in this aspect, multimodality opens up possibilities that give new meaning to the way of looking at deafness and ways of teaching the written code of an oral language to deaf users of sign language.