Brazilian Deaf Beginners’ Difficulties When Learning Writte

The languages in the world can be expressed in different ways. For example, Portuguese, English ans Spanish are spoken languages, whose comunication is oral. By contrast, American Sign Language, Brazilian Sign Language and Spanish Sign Language are sign languages, which use a manual way of communication. Independently of the way they communicate, languages express the language faculty (Chomsky, 1995, apud Quadros, 2003).

Sign languages’ structure can be considered as complex as spoken and written languages’ structure, and also perform a similar range of funtions, as Stokoe (1965, apud Quadros, op. cit.) defends.

No single sign language exists. There are many such languages (American, French…) and they are not mutually intelligible. They use different signs and different rules of sign formation and sentence structure.

LIBRAS (Brazilian Sign Language) is the sign language used by deaf people that live in the urban centers of Brazil, where there are deaf communities. Besides this one, there is another

kind of sign language, used by the Urubus-Kaapor indians in the Amazon Forest. But this work is investigating just the first one, that is different and independent from Portuguese – the Brazilian spoken language. The differences are not only on the way their communication takes place, but also on the grammatical structures.

The main argument against Oralism is that its methods are often unsuccessful (Sacks, 1990, apud Quadros, 1997), with a speech that is limited and difficult to understand. The mais argument against Total Communication, according to Brito (1993, apud Quadros, op. cit.), is that sign language cannot be used simultaneously with the other resources cited above. Besides, this philosophy does not give sign language the place it deserves – the deafs’ mother tongue. Thus, considering that Bilingualism is the most appropriate educational programme for deaf students (Quadros, op. cit.), this work intends to study the process of written EFL teaching to Brazilian deaf people.

It is considered that Brazilian deafs have LIBRAS as their natural language (L1) and written and/or spoken Portuguese as their second language (L2). When talking about teaching English to them, we must think about English as a foreign language (EFL) – “a non-native language that has no status as a routine medium of communication in a country” (Crystal, 1997). In this process, it is necessary to teach written English through LIBRAS, because it is believed to be their natural language, the one which really permits them to develop la

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