Narrativas de professores de ensino superior sobre o uso da língua portuguesa escrita por surdos

Abstract

One of the greatest problems caused by the auditory losses are the effects in the oral and written linguistic development. In the 80 s and part of the 90 s, deaf children, who were born of parents who could listen, attended elementary education and High School and they had Portuguese as their instruction language. Therefore, it was expected that their written skills in this language, when they got to university, presented satisfactory conditions of register of ideas and thoughts in a way that readers could understand their meaning. Bearing this in mind, the objective of this work was to verify how the university professors analyze the general linguistic competence of their deaf pupils in the Portuguese Language, and mainly their written abilities. More specifically for this research, we tried to verify how professors judge the performance of the deaf people: in their written skills, considering the classic form of Portuguese Language. Seventeen university professors who teach deaf people had taken part in this study. For this study, we use a qualitative and quantitative methodology. The data collection was carried out by a questionnaire and by a half-structured interview, among the university professors of deaf people. The data had been categorized structuring the presented ideas in narratives by the professors and were written in their literal form. The results had been analyzed and discussed according to the theories of Minayo (1999). The data analysis helped us to conclude that the professors had identified that the writing ability of the university deaf student in Recife and Olinda showed difficulties which had already been identified by other researchers in other Brazilian cities. This has made us realize that the deaf people bring a description of written language skills marked by gaps, that remain throughout their academic phase, and this demands, among some other possibilities, the use of new strategies to learn the Portuguese language