“I can also write!”: narrating the production of a Portuguese as a Second Language to Deaf People teaching material from a postcolonial and translingual perspective

ABSTRACT

Although legislation recognizes the importance of guaranteeing the teaching of Portuguese as a Second Language in the context of deaf education, there are still few studies that focus on strategies for this teaching context and few teaching materials developed considering these strategies. In this article, we focus on the process of elaborating a teaching material for Portuguese as a Second Language to Deaf people produced within the scope of the Portuguese as a Second Language/Foreign Language (PSL/PFL) Pre-Service course. This course is part of the degree in Portuguese as a Second Language/Foreign Language offered at the Institute of Language Studies at the State University of Campinas. Considering the dialogue between practice and meta-reflection of fundamental importance for both the training of researchers and teachers, we are more specifically interested in discussing how teachers in pre-service period understand the operationalization of this teaching material from a postcolonial and translingual perspective. In line with the critical and interdisciplinary aspect of Applied Linguistics (Moita Lopes, 2006), which has the apparatus of qualitative-interpretative research with an ethnographic perspective as one of its pillars, we consider a corpus that, in addition to documentary data, sought to focus on the voices of the undergraduates, since our objective here is to illuminate issues related to teacher education. The following are part of the corpus: (i) the reading list for the PSL/PFL pre-service course offered in the second semester of 2021; (ii) excerpts from the didactic material that was prepared; (iii) excerpts from pre-service training reports produced by students; (iv) excerpts from one PSL/PFL pre-service course theoretical class. The reflections carried out by the undergraduates point to the need to (re)think bilingual education for deaf people departing from projects that are more sensitive to the cultural, social and linguistic plurality of today’s world, considering the heteroglossic potential of social language practices.

Keywords:
Portuguese as a second language to deaf people; Text-book; Teacher education