Relação entre o tipo de ensino e o funcionamento executivo de crianças surdas entre os 5 e os 11 anos

Abstract

The present study has as main goals to identify and describe the types of teaching practiced on the Bilingual reference schools in Portugal, and to explore the possible effects on the executive functioning of Portuguese deaf children aged between 5 and 11 years old. So, we have developed and applied two surveys: one about the type of teaching practiced in each group / school / class in cooperation with the present study filled by the teacher; and a sociodemographic survey about the children but applied to the parents. For the analyze of the executive functioning in Portuguese deaf children, we have applied a rating scale of executive functioning BRIEF (Gioia, Isquith, Kenworthy, 2000; Portuguese version from Ribeiro, Santos & Correia, 2012) from the student to each teacher and each parent. In this study we had 13 Reference School for Bilingual Education, 34 classes (10 classes of pre-primary education and 24 school level) and 61 Portuguese deaf children. On what concerns the type of teaching practiced in EREB in Portugal, the results have showed, from the 13 Reference School for Bilingual Education of this study, mostly (12), that mainly the teaching of deaf children is bilingual with resource to the special education teachers and speech therapist. However, inside the same reference school, we can find bilingual and monolingual teaching, depending on the characteristics of the average population, for example, hearing loss degree and use of hearing aids. We could find classes composed only by deaf children and others with hearing and deaf children. On what concerns the law decree nº54/2018, almost all schools have specialized teachers, such as, teacher of special education, Portuguese Sign Language teachers, speech therapists and LGP interprets. The results revealed that when the evaluation of the executive functioning took place by the parents, the children on the monolingual teaching revealed reliable performance on the behavior regulation index as well as, on the Metacognition. However, when the evaluation of the executive functioning took place by the teachers, the Portuguese deaf children on the bilingual teaching, presented a higher percentage of level good on what concerns the global executive compound. Considering the second analysis where we have gathered the opinions of parents and teachers, both teaching methods seem to have positive effects on the development of the executive functioning, being the bilingual children with a slight higher percentages on their performance. With this research, we could think ahead about the teaching of deaf children, where the bilingual teaching is present on Portuguese schools, and the executive functioning of deaf children doesn’t seem to be weakened when facing it’s learning context.

Date of Award	16 Sept 2022
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Joana Rodrigues Rato (Supervisor) & Mara Moita (Co-Supervisor)