English Teachers and Deaf Students inside the Educational Inclusion in Brazil

English Teachers and Deaf Students inside the Educational Inclusion in Brazil

Cristina de Carvalho Brito, Rejane

This study investigates the representations that the English teachers from Minas Gerais state (Brazil) public schools have about deaf students’ educational inclusion into regular schools. The research objective is the teacher-subject’s discourse, considering that such a subject is constituted in/by language and historically and socially built. We focus on teachers’ representations about their teaching practice, the English language, about deaf and hearing students, and also the Brazilian sign language and its interpreters. The results indicates that considering such representations, the way the teachers deal with their practice and with the other people involved in the teaching-learning process can be better understood. This research located in the Applied Linguistics field is based on concepts of Discourse Analysis. The corpus was built through audio-recorded interviews and class observation. After transcribing the interviews, the corpus was linguistically and discursively analyzed, identifying the identity shifts, contradictions on discourse, discourse regularities as well as the representations presented by the teachers about their practice. Through interpretation gestures, a chain of representations have been achieved, to perceive how teachers develop their teaching deaf and hearing students in the classroom. Based on the interviewed teachers’ discourse, the results indicate that the Inclusive Education is seen as an impossible reality. Moreover, those teachers do not see themselves as the idealized teacher who is pictured on political and pedagogical discourses. As a conclusion, the study points that teachers predominantly take two enunciative positions, ranging from that of inhibition to a creative one. In the first position they are inhibited when they face deaf and hearing students in the same classroom. In the second position, though, they are creative in the same situation. The contradiction on different enunciative positions indicates two discursive formation in the teachers discourse which were defined as inhibi(ac)tion and crea(c)tion.

Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed

2012

961