2.1 Daily Struggles in Deaf Lives
Guimarães et al., (2011b) conducted a series of
immersive research with Deaf students of an
undergraduate course of Linguistic/Libras (the
Brazilian Sign Language). There were 80 students,
35 men, 45 women, ages from 24 to 39 (average of
30 years of age). All of the students chose the
television as their source of information; they had no
real relationship with their families; they relied on
whatever little piece of information in SL they could
get; the teacher was their confident for personal
matter, among others. They all suffered prejudices,
lack of SL use and late acquisition of Libras:
Most of them were from non-deaf families that
imposed the oral culture. They were tossed from
school to school, and had no education in SL until
their late teens (at the age of 14, in average). The
following is a transcript of one of their statements:
“[…] my mother didn’t know I was Deaf until I
was two (2) years old. She forced me to oralize.
When I started school, they beat me in the
mouth: ‘You can’t sign’. I didn’t understand
anything. I got beaten, she pulled my ears, and I
was there, helpless […]”
Such situation was common among the Deaf
students, and show the problems faced by the child,
left to their own devices, suffering prejudices, not
developing proper social, affective and intellectual
skills; and not being exposed to an environment
permissive of natural language acquisition.
Additionally, it is no wonder that they
demonstrated poor Libras skills due, mostly, to
lack of Standard and dissemination. The lack of a
standard vector for the Deaf implies in several
inadequate skills in SL (e.g. errors, lack of
knowledge of grammar, several gestures, instead of
signs, among others). Tools in Libras (educational or
of another nature) to which the students had access
were rare, and proved to be detrimental (rather than
helpful) to the development of Libras. For example,
Capovilla et al., 2009 and Rybená, 2011 are
dictionaries, but only present a one-to-one mapping
of the oral language to the SL (thus, making it of
little use to the Deaf who doesn’t know the oral
language.
2.2 Lack of Natural Language
Acquisition
For Chomsky (1986), the ability to understand,
create and transform culture is a human trait that is
language-dependent. Kyle (2005) tells that the gaps
between the Deaf and her family, due to the lack of
communication, are the cause of high levels of
mental diseases later in the Deaf’s life, in direct
relation to life and survival of the Deaf.
Brito, (1993) tells that without SL acquisition,
the Deaf has a diminished ability to perform tasks
for the development of intelligent action: the Deaf
does not learn how to plan and how to overcome
impulsive action; the Deaf does not become
independent of the visual, concrete situation and the
Deaf has difficulties to control herself and to
socialize. Consequently, members of the Deaf
community are more likely to suffer from: the lack
of meaning and knowledge creation; the lack of
identity and cultural diversity; the lack of intellectual
development, among others, says Finau, (2006). All
of these predicaments are dire consequences caused
by the lack of affective ties of the human being with
language. Due to this language barrier, the non-Deaf
parents encounter difficulties to teach their Deaf
children even the basics, such as personal hygiene
etc.
2.3 Literacy and Sign Language
For Sánchez, (1991), language is more than a way of
communication, and it includes a regulation function
of thought, according to Vigotsky, (1974).
Bilingualism, considered to be more adequate for
Deaf education, is the movement that claims the use
of, at least, two languages: SL, as a first language,
and a second language in its written form – in our
case, Portuguese, the oral language of Brazil.
For Lévy, (1999, p.10), society must go beyond
the mere use of computers for games and leisure,
thus limiting its use. This is a clear call for an
innovative, intellectual, interactive use of
technologies: to make sense of the world, the child
must be able to construct her own mental models of
interactions, and, for such, e-learning tools (that
scaffold this process) are needed: “new intellectual
technologies” that are to be used for Literacy.
Literacy is the resulting process of social
practices of the use of the written form of the oral
language as a symbolic system and as a technology,
in specific contexts, for specific goals (in our
context, to be acquired by the Deaf by a functional
use of the language, where the language assumes a
character of real meaning). “Therefore, Literacy as
effective appropriation is pleasurable, is leisure, is
access to information, is communication, is a way to
exercise citizenship in different social practices”
(Fernandes 2012, p.131).
Since Stokoe, (2000) we have that SL are
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