To include in the public education network the bilingual teaching system for deaf children -as a base for learning Portuguese – is the objective of the project that researchers at the University of Ribeirão Preto (Unaerp) are developing. In Brazil, qualified professionals in this area in the public system are rare, since the large majority doesn't dominate the Brazilian Sign Language (Libras).
The state most advanced in this aspect is Rio Grande do Sul – in Porto Alegre, 40 students with hearing deficiencies attends colleges, thanks to the existence, within the classrooms, of an instructor who acts as an interpreter. The vast majority of institutions insist on the conventional method. “The result of this is negative. It distances the deaf child from his peers”, says the psychologist Tárcia Regina da Silveira Dias, from the course of Speech Therapy of Unaerp. “The Libras system is the first language for deaf people. Portuguese is their second, and therefore, has to be taught based on the meanings that the pupils acquired through their first.”
With the support of FAPESP, Tárcia is coordinating the project for the implantation of bilingual teaching in three institutions: the State School named Professor Fernandes Palma of Ribeirão Preto, the State School named Sílvio de Almeida of Batatais, and the Municipal School of Special Primary Education named Blue Star, located in Jaboticabal. During the first phase of the project, family members of the deaf children were trained in Libras and, if the second phase is approved, the training will be extended to 115 professionals – professors, psychologists, and speech therapy – who together deal with 125 children, adolescents and deaf adults. “It is fundamental that the Libras be taught by deaf and adult instructors, because they teach both the language and the manner of communicating as well as the life style of deaf people”, says the coordinator. There are teachers for written Portuguese and for spoken Portuguese.
In an attempt to follow to the letter the bilingual model, consolidated in Sweden and Denmark, the Unaerp research group hired, for their work on academic extension, an instructor qualified through the National Federation of Education and Integration of the Deaf (Feneis). This professional trained the five deaf monitor who are part of the project – which proposes the presence of an instructor in each teaching room. “That failure of the deaf children in the school has ended. Bilingualism shows that they he have potential, but that they need infrastructure, above all that of an interpreter.”
The learning process also depends on resources that compensate for the auditory deficiency. FAPESP financed the purchase of computers and educational software and provided resources for the production of didactic material suitable for teaching the Libras program. “With this support, we are having the possibility of working with multimedia projectors, which project films and even software of an extended form. The schools are poor and had no way of acquiring this equipment. This has changed the quality of teaching.” As Tárcia reminds, children who don't hear make use of images to understand their world.
Republish