Blogging http://www.englishnowhere.blogspot.com: ensinando inglês (sem distância) para surdos

Abstract

This work investigates the didactic possibilities of using the World Wide Web, specifically on exploring the blog as an additional tool to enhance the teaching and learning of a foreign language (English in this case) for hearing impaired students. Our target sample consistes of a group of deaf students, in the city of Uberlândia, in the State of Minas Gerais, Brazil, that intend to pass the entrance examinations to pursue studies in the Federal University of Uberlândia. We aimed, primarily, in identifying the possible contributions of the blog to these purposes, while valuing and sharpening their visual perception, having in mind that for such subjects exploiting this particular human sense would be of paramount importance to our research purposes. Accordingly, our work gets its theoretical support on the interpretive qualitative research as for data collecting and processing instruments, we used questionnaires, blogging framework interactive tools, reading and writing activities, both in the proposed virtual environment.The research was carried upon a group of 8 students enrolled in CAS Alternative Course for the Deaf that were monitored for both their participative performance in the reading and writing classes in the virtual environment (Internet). The general structure of the didactic material used, named englishnowhere reflects its pinpointed objective, namely that of helping the student to develop global reading strategies, that is, the acquisition of the foreign language through reading practice. The focus on all of the 13 (thirteen) proposed activities consisted in a critical consideration about the strategic knowledge needed to be developed in order that the students could produce sense while resolving any given reading task. The thematic subjects chosen were highly diversified in their scope and were selected from various Internet sources, so as to enhance the student interest in reading, by exploring say daily life matters, stories, fiction subjects, etc , among others, where we made constant use of images and visual components, in order to facilitate the understanding of the text by our hearing impaired students. In fact, in what refers to consolidating their writing ability it was verified that the students were able to do writing on-line without having, in a first moment, to worry about eventual mistakes. Now, as far as online reading ability was concerned, the students were seen to becoming gradually faster readers as their appreciation for readership became increasingly larger. A decisive contribution to that came from the fact that they were exposed on-line to specially creative visual representations as well as to animated characters that, on moving across the screen, facilitated the reading process, a fact that was conjugated to their interactive exploration of the thematic subjects composing each learning module. As to using the blog, we concluded that this type of virtual environment demonstrated to be a rather innovative and satisfactory technological tool, for while making available several visual resources, it also allowed for the quick insertion of links to other pertinent Internet homepages. In short, on seeing it from the user perspective, our findings indicate that the blog framework could be characterized as an organized, interesting and friendly web surfing tool, so that all the participants in the project could use it with no difficult at all, having no problem in uploading and using it at home. To sum up, we have developed a special teaching and learning process for deaf students, where we conjugated some principles from information technology, a definite landmark of contemporary civilization, represented here by our using of Web 2.0. We hope that with the enhancement of the students creative expression through the use of friendly software as pedagogical tools we can contribute to future research and to society.