Objeto de aprendizagem baseado em redes sociais para ensino de Libras a alunos ouvintes

Abstract

If we consider the 9.6 million Brazilians with some hearing impairment and knowing that the average number of people per family in Brazil is 3.3, it could be inferred by a number of more than 30 million people who are highly involved in solving deafness communication problems. In Brazil, according to Decree 5,636 of 2005, the Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) is an official language for the deaf person’s communication. However, international statistics show that 95% of deaf children are daughters of parents who are unfortunately unaware or deny sign language. Lack of knowledge about the sign language and deafness makes parents seek a “cure” and oralization methods with no place to educate their children through sign language. Deafness ends up being treated as a disease and not as a social problem that needs a differentiated care. Without a sign language the deaf person has difficulties in developing a logical reasoning pattern necessary for their social and intellectual growth, which directly interferes in the learning of a written language, such as Portuguese. Although the Libras is an official language for the Brazilian deafs, the same decree also emphasizes the importance of the deaf person to communicate with hearing people. In this sense, the decree defines an obligation of providing the course of Libras in undergraduate courses for teachers and phonoaudiology. Given the shortage of interpreters, researchs report that it is difficult to meet the requirements of the law, which often leads to the supply of low quality courses, aiming only at achieving the minimum hours required. Based on the assumption that the difficulties presented in relation to communication are linked to the learning of a second language, the goal of this work is to facilitate the learning of Libras by hearing students, aiming to reduce the social exclusion existing between the two communities. The present work believes that this objective can be achieved through a learning object equipped with a Portuguese translator-Libras integrated to an instant messaging communicator of a social network. In this way, the proposed learning object can be used by both deaf and hearing people, allowing the two communities to interact each other in an accessible and real-time way, involving automatic translation from Portuguese to Libras. An evaluation experiment was carried out with 30 volunteers, whose results highlight the importance of the tool to stimulate contact with sign language. The preliminary results also show evidence of the potential of the proposed tool to facilitate the learning of Portuguese by deaf students. However, a more careful evaluation in this sense is one of the future work identified.