The development of deaf people’s writing in Portuguese (Second language) and English (third language): Similarities and differences

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate communication strategies development in deaf students’ writing in English and Portuguese. For this, an English course was carried out in two modules: 120h (beginner) and 80h (pre-intermediate), in which Libras was the language of instruction. Twelve deaf students participated in module I and eight in module II. This is a longitudinal case study with quali-quantitative analysis. Overall, the data suggest that there has been a stimulus to the use of communication strategies in English and Portuguese writing, mainly in the first part of the course. Besides that, in the second part of the course, the dependence of Libras and Portuguese in the English texts (and Libras in Portuguese texts) decreased, indicating that there was linguistic knowledge acquisition in English and Portuguese.