Description
This research has the multimodality in narratives of a blind child as an object of study, contributing to the understanding of which multimodal resources are used by this child to produce meaning in narrating fairy tales, for the child does not make use of the sight to represent and perceive some gestures. Thus, we base our study in a perspective that
conceives language as multimodal as proposed by Kendon (1982), McNeill (2000), Cavalcante (2009), Ávila-Nóbrega; Cavalcante (2012), Fonte (2009, 2011a, 2011b, 2011c, 2012) and Fonte et al (2014) comprehending that gesture and speech are an integrated system of meaning. Based on this perspective, our general aim is to analyze
the multimodal resources used by a blind child in the recount of fairy tales and as our specific aims to verify the roles of such multimodal resources that the blind child makes use of in retelling the tales, and also to identify and describe the speech, prosody and gestures during the narration of the tales. For this, we carried out an observational,
qualitative and case of study research, with a nine-year-old blind child, who is blind from birth but does not present pathologies associated to his/her blindness. The child goes to Centro de Apoio pedagógico à Pessoa Visual (CAP) and also to school, where he/she is at the first year of fundamental 1. For our methodology we chose three classic
tales from Disney: Little Red Riding Hood, The three Little Pigs and Snow White. These three classic tales were presented to the child in audio description in the child s home. The narration and recount of the tales were recorded and transcribed with the software Eudico Linguistic Annotator (ELAN). Besides this, we selected as categories of analysis the elements in the multimodal envelope: verbal, prosodic and gestural proposed by Ávila-Nóbrega (2010) and Fonte (2011). Results show that while recounting the tales the blind child took over different roles, sometimes the narrator, sometimes the character. These narratives were mediated by the multimodality of language, characterized by prosodic variations such as: strong and weak intensity, duration, pauses, speech speed. Furthermore, the child used verbal productions, that is, the speech, contemplating not only the narrative structure but also varied gestures including body gesticulations characterized by head movements, shoulders, hands and
legs that contributed to the construction of meaning in the recount of the tales.
