Texts written by deaf people in messages on the WhatsApp application: organization of meaning and perspectives on teaching written Portuguese as a second language

Abstract

This text is a study about messages written in Portuguese and sent via the WhatsApp application by bilingual deaf adults, users of Brazilian Sign Language – Libras, as their first language (L1) and of the Portuguese language, in the written modality, as second language (L2). The goal of the work is to analyze the written production of these deaf people with a focus on how meaning is organized around the messages, observing the strategies utilized by users for the construction of texts. In addition to that, we seek to discuss the data of this study applied to the teaching of written Portuguese as L2, aiming to subsidize the teaching of this language to deaf people. Texts from deaf individuals with which the authors are in constant contact were selected. In these texts, several different topics are discussed, such as work, study, leisure, and others. After the analysis of the corpus, we observed specific forms in the usage of Portuguese, not recommended by the written normative standard of that language, and structural interferences from Libras. Thus, it can be concluded that the meaning of the texts, although some configurational aspects of the written language do not meet the standard norm of Portuguese, are constructed to create meaning and to express a particular understanding of the world; this perspective, in some sense, can subsidize the teaching of written Portuguese as L2 to deaf people.