Alunos surdos

: as competências inferenciais e linguísticas na compreensão de textos narrativos

Abstract

The constant changes in the portuguese educational system (Lei deBases do Sistema Educativo) and in the statecrafts or guidelines of the Ministryof Education, based on diverse projects of investigation, for Intermediate andHigh school, of which we point out the decreto-lei n.º 3/2008 and the elaborationof the curricula for Portuguese Sign Language and Portuguese SecondLanguage, consolidate the importance of the understanding of the particularitiesof children with hearing impairment.According to the current theories and legislation, the adoption of abi/multilingual model of education confines in itself the premise of each thelearning of diverse languages contributes unmistakably to the child’sdevelopment. Thus, bearing in mind these discrepancies on pupils’ educationalroutes or, in some cases, the delayed access to a language and the meaningfuldifferences between the different languages at school, particularly thePortuguese Sign Language/First Language, the Portuguese Language/SecondLanguage and the Foreign Language/ Second or Third Language, becomespertinent to determine some of the difficulties in the acquisition of certain skillsrelated to the abilities of the mother tongue (LM) of the majority of thePortuguese population, that is, the Portuguese.Considering the linguistic diversity of the literary texts and the structure ofthe Portuguese Sign Language, and the awareness of the necessity to limit thefield of study, it was considered necessary to contribute for the knowledge ofthese pupils’ aptitudes and skills in the understanding of narrative texts withsome complexity to the level of the structure and the language, by reading itscontent. Therefore, we intended to determine if a child with hearing impairmentactivates the necessary mechanisms for the adequate understanding andapprehension of these contents.In order to assess the performance of these students, we used thenecessary tools and materials, which consisted in the analysis of literarynarrative texts, which had been elaborated and chosen according to theguidelines of the Portuguese curriculum and the level of education of theparticipants. Thus, we conceived instruments for students in the intermediategrades, in a total of 22 participants, in order to determine their capacity inactivating the necessary procedures for the anticipation, deduction or inferenceof the contents of a literary text, mainly in the incorporeal and semanticsdimension of a language.We conclude that a child with hearing impairment is capable to interpretcorrectly paratextual elements and, therefore, to anticipate meaningsconcerning a text. However, we noticed that these students had somelimitations decoding or understanding words or expressions semanticallydiverse, as well as messages with implicit meanings.

Date of Award	2012
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Filomena Ponte (Supervisor)