EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY OF TOTAL COMMUNICATION FOR DEAF PEOPLE: THE SIMULTANEOUS USE OF DIFFERENT COMMUNICATION MODALITIES

Resumen

The Philosophy of Total Communication emerged amid possible signs of failure of the Oralist Conception. The professionals who defended it initially relied on different modalities, other than the oralist one, when receiving a deaf student in educational institutions, since the student was seen as someone who had a pathology that would need treatment to eliminate deafness. Thus causing a mark that has been echoing in social relations, in affective and cognitive development, because in total communication it is believed that learning the oral language does not ensure the development of the deaf child. Furthermore, the objective of Total Communication would be the simultaneous use of different modalities, that is, Sign Language and Signed Portuguese. All these manual codes are used following the grammatical structure of the oral language, without respecting the structure of sign language itself. However, this approach understands that children are imposed to the digital alphabet, sign language, sound amplification, and also signed Portuguese. In this way, the present qualitative research elucidates the importance of reflecting on the different educational philosophies that, eventually, harm communication, which combines sign language, gestures, mime, lip reading, and other resources that collaborate with the development of oral language for the deaf person. For this, the theoretical framework was based on the contributions of authors such as Ciccone (1990), Penha (2018), Giroletti (2017), Schelp (2008), and Quadros (1997). The research, based on the statements of these authors, detected that the simultaneity between sign languages and the Portuguese language is impracticable, since their grammatical structures are different, and also that the languages involved in the process have some parameters in common, but the differences are greater than the similarities, because they are two distinct languages.