TEACHING ENGLISH TO DEAF STUDENTS: An Analysis of Pedagogical Strategies rooted in Teacher-Student Interaction and Visually-Oriented Materials

Abstract

This study emerges based on an outreach project named CLLIS in search of developing a safe space for deaf people to learn, rooted in Quadros’s (2005) notion of Bilingualism. The course was created in an attempt to investigate if the goals set within this thesis were accurate and applicable. Based on deaf people’s cultural views and their signed language, we set as our general aim analysing the pedagogical strategies, rooted in teacher student and student-student interaction and the visually-oriented materials, that successfully tended to their specific learning needs and their peculiarities, as well as the ones that did not. This way, so as to achieve this goal, we also had to set a couple of specific objectives, which are: identifying the teaching strategies that respond to Deaf people’s cultural, linguistic and social experiences; looking into teacher-student and student-student interaction; and examining the visually-oriented materials. Theoretically, the notions of Identity (HALL, 1992), Deaf Identity (PERLIN, 1998), understandings of reading (CANADA, 2006) (BRAZIL, 2018) and others, as well as Marcuschi (2010), Bakhtin (2003), in terms of genre as a powerful element in language teaching were put into play. Also, we based this research on the understanding of Visual Pedagogy (CAMPELLO, 2008) and its branches. As a way of safekeeping the achievements of these goals, we used as methodological foundation Yilmaz (2013) relative to the qualitative nature of our thesis and Rose et al. (2015) as for to prove the status of case study this paper has. In this sense, we

uncovered that the use of sign language in class to teach the Deaf and the use of visually- oriented materials are key to giving them a space that fully tend to their educational needs,

considering them as a group of people with a distinct culture and language who are different from their hearing counterparts.