Desafios na educação plurilíngue para alunos surdos

Abstract

Brazilian deaf students have always been struggling with learning while they are in school, many of them can not even learn their own language, the Brazilian Sign Language, so that they can develop good communication with others. Otherwise, the teaching of other languages such as English for instance, is not just mandatory in the schools’ syllabus but also a right of all to learn it. However, how can a deaf student learn a foreign language in an environment where the methodologies are not suitable for them? The main goal of this article is to briefly discuss some of the problems found by these students in schools of basic education. We gave some light over these facts and also looked for some thoughts to update these methodologies. Our exploratory research with qualitative nature collected some data from a structured interview with two deaf participants about their experience, both as students and teachers in the language area, to understand their struggles and collect their thoughts on teaching of the English language to deaf students in Brazil. The collected data point that the unsuitable methodologies in language teaching make the acquisition and the student’s development pretty hard because of the lack of didactic and methodological resources, also the training of teachers do not take in consideration the students' variety and the public policy in education.