Criança surda na Educação Infantil: interações possíveis para o seu desenvolvimento linguístico

Abstract

Early childhood education comprises a very important step in the development of deaf children that have, most of the time, the school as the main context of language acquisition. That said, in this dissertation, the aim is analyze a deaf children interactions in early childhood education. Therefore, based on the perspective of applied linguistics, authors of the field of Deaf Studies that focus on linguistic education of deaf children and of the field of Childhood Studies, was developed an ethnographic case study at an early childhood education municipal school in the city of Vila Velha, Espírito Santo, with a deaf child as student. Dialogue worked as a unit of analysis, assuming an interactionist perspective that language acquisition constitutes a process of subjectivation. The results of this research showed a fragile interactional panorama in the early childhood education classroom where is the deaf child. Despite facing challenges to interact to listeners, the deaf child found possibilities in dialogues with linguístics restrictions by (i) gestured interactions with hearing children, (ii) orofacial reading of what is said in Portuguese by teachers and, sometimes (iii) interpretation of Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) by a bilingual teacher. Based on these elements, there is a challenge that overcome the limits of school institutions: the construction of linguistic environments that could develop deaf children since the familiar context, where the potential of deafness as linguistic difference can guide the establishment of language policies in many domains. The research offers thoughts about the visibility of deaf children in the linguistic organization of school institutions and the language practices that involves them in educational contexts as well.