Contextualization factors in texts written by a deaf student¹

Abstract

The aim of this work is to analyze the learning process of a deaf student from activities carried out in a writing workshop in Portuguese offered by a non-deaf teacher. Questions: 1) How does a deaf student manage, in his texts, contextualization factors, the elements that embed the text in a certain communicative situation? and 2) to what measure is the teacher´s intervention necessary to make the student understand the use of titles in texts? Comparisons of 29 complete texts were made, emphasizing the construction of titles. The main transformations were: 1) attention to spelling; 2) paragraph use; 3) title refinement; 4) calculation of the possible interpretation of the readers; 5) use of connectors; 6) verb conjugation and 7) syntax. Regarding the writing of titles, the pedagogic activity was seen to be fundamental to the deaf student’s achievement of this competency.

Keywords
writing; deafness; teaching; textual coherence; titles

Resumo

O trabalho tem como objetivo analisar o percurso de aprendizagem de escrita de um aluno surdo a partir de atividades realizadas em uma oficina de redação em Língua Portuguesa, ministrada por um professor ouvinte. Questões: 1) Como um estudante surdo administra, em seus escritos, os fatores de contextualização, elementos que ancoram o texto em uma situação comunicativa determinada? e 2) Em que medida a intervenção do professor é necessária para que o aluno surdo venha a compreender o uso de títulos de textos? Foi realizada comparação de 29 textos, com ênfase na construção dos títulos. Principais alterações: 1) atenção à grafia das palavras; 2) uso de parágrafos; 3) refinamento de título; 4) cálculo da interpretação do leitor; 5) uso de conectivos; 6) conjugação verbal e 7) sintaxe. Com relação à escrita de títulos, a ação docente mostrou-se fundamental para a conquista dessa competência por parte de um aluno surdo.

Palavras-chave
escrita; surdez; ensino; coerência textual; títulos

Contextualization factors and Human language

In this text, we analyze how a deaf student, in his writing, manages the elements that embed the text in a given communicative situation: the contextual factors (Favero & Koch, 1983).

More specifically, we verify how the title, one of the prospective contextualization factors, is used by a student of a Portuguese language writing workshop which is given to deaf people from a bilingual education conception (Brito, 1989; Bolsanello, & Sander 2011). This conception, more specifically, "consists of working with two languages in the school context, and in this case, the languages in question are the Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) and the Portuguese Language (PL) in written form" (Streiechen & Krause- Lemke, 2014, p.959). The research carried out was aligned within studies whose authors favor the presence of sign languages in the education of people who, consequently, will become writers in a language other than the one they originally practice (Brito, 1993; Capovilla, 2004). (2004).

We chose this competence as the aim of this study because the titles of the texts are a contextualization factor, and their role is fundamental for writing interpretation. The way in which they can activate expectations about the topic proposed by the writer is one of the relevant factors for the setting up of textual coherence, connecting the text with the reader's world knowledge, also visualizing the text writer’s stance (Fávero, 1991; Koch & Travaglia, 1989; Marcuschi, 1983; Van Dijik, 1990).

The ability to distinguish between

a text and a non-text; to paraphrase a text; to summarize it; to give it a title; to produce a text from a given title; to understand the set of actions and intentions of the text; to distinguish the different types of text, etc.

(Fávero, 1991, p. 99)

This achievement of textual competence is a great challenge for the deaf, a population whose writing difficulties have been the subject of much research, and which has confirmed that deaf students have in fact found it difficult to carry out the National High School Examination in the area of Humanities, which directly includes writing and reading skills (Martins & Lacerda, 2015).

Nevertheless, preliminary contact with deaf students’ written texts shows that elements considered essential for the establishment of coherence and cohesion (Charolles, 1978; Costa Val, 1999) can be found to a greater or lesser degree. On the one hand, texts written by deaf students obey the requirements of meta-rules: a) repetition, reiteration of text expressions, which can occur by means of synonyms, hypernyms, same word repetition, among others; b) progression, the addition of new topics or comments to the subject that ensures the textual unit; c) non-contradiction, a process that ensures maintenance of logical principles; and d) relation, articulation that contemplates how the facts presented in the text are linked and which functions or values they exert in relation to each other (Charolles, 1989). On the other hand, information about the meaning and function of cohesive chains in written production seems to be lacking for the deaf (Meirelles & Spinillo, 2004).

The present work is aligned with studies that analyze the writing of deaf students in agreement with the school´s daily reality (Lins & Nascimento, 2015). It envisages that deaf students and listeners need, equally, to master the same skills and abilities to learn how to write (Marschark, Lampropoulou, & Skordilis, 2016).

Following other researcher’s examples that have dedicated themselves to the clarification of writing for the deaf (Brochado, 2003; Fernandes, 1999), the work looks at the particularities in the textual productions of these subjects, which have been described as being marked by transposition attempts of the Libras sign language to writing and characterized by lexical restriction; by the difficulty of pronominal person usage; by inappropriate or absent use of connectives; and by the presentation of the verbs in the infinitive form.

If, on the one hand, the peculiarities of written modality acquisition by the deaf are unquestionable (Salles, Faulstich, Carvalho, & Felix, 2004), on the other, even the highly abstract concepts can be set up in concrete images through the signs (Taub, 2001). Due to being a human embodiment, language is a basis for the foundation of thought and subjectivity (Benveniste, 1988). Therefore, these abilities can be found in any language, even in those where oral interaction is impossible.

The characteristic of being unlimited in its combinations and being able to produce unforeseeable sense effects, based on the metaphorical axis arrangements (referring to the mechanisms of selection and substitution of one term for another) and on the metonymic axis (referring to the combination of the linear mode linguistic units, in which words make sense) (Jakobson, 2001) is also present in sign languages, in which there is a strong presence of metonymy, as for example in the creation of signs for lexical items that arise from a referent metonymy, as is the case with rabbit and ox signs, which refer directly to body parts of these animals (ears and horns, respectively) (Wilcox, 2000).

Textual competence is a human faculty linked to discourse and not to one or another language. Thus, we can affirm that deaf people’s textual production has a texture, in other words, it relies on factors such as intertextuality, situationality, acceptability, informativeness, intentionality, contextualization, coherence and cohesion (Koch & Travaglia, 1989).

Considering that, in the case of the deaf, the exercise of writing can offer an important support to mobilize verbal interactions both in the acquisition of the written language and in the sign language itself (Arcoverde, 2006), the research carried out was guided by two questions: How does a deaf student manage, in his writing, contextualization factors, elements that embed the text in a given communicative situation? and 2) to what extent is the intervention of the Portuguese Language teacher necessary for the deaf student to understand the use of text titles?

The outline of the research carried out

The article is an instrumental case study, a research format that, based on the investigation of a case, aims to contribute to the understanding of a broader issue, which provides support for other research (Stake, 2009). More specifically, it aims to promote a discussion about the writing of deaf people based on the investigation of a student’s textual production.

It is an investigation directed towards the history of an adolescent in writing workshops, given within a social inclusion project and offered by an education institute in São Paulo, whose mission it is to train young people and people with disabilities for inclusion in the labor market, undertaking the need to overcome three of the main challenges in the education of deaf students: academic integration; social integration; and integration of a very diverse student population (Stinson & Antia, 1999).

The workshop, studied in this research, had a total of 120 hours, divided into 30 meetings held at night. It took place between February and August 2013, always on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. They were taught by a Portuguese-speaking teacher (bilingual in Portuguese and Libras) and assisted by an interpreter of Libras.

The methodology of the workshop was the priority use of writing for communication in class, leading the student to undergo an experience in which writing was the focus. Eleven text production proposals were worked on: 1) What are your expectations about writing workshops?; 2) Is there an exaggeration in the relationship between men and pets?; 3) Technology and invasion of privacy; 4) Man: enemy of the planet; 5) Happiness: between having and being; 6) The moral values and their importance in society; 7) Graffiti: between vandalism and art; 8) The future of art; 9) Flattery: virtue or defect?; 10) The forest fire issues in Brazil; and 11) What is your perception of writing? The first and last proposals were prepared by the teacher and the 9 other proposals were taken from the Universidade Estadual Paulista Júlio de Mesquita Filho, UNESP, entrance exams.

The class was made up of 20 students, with different levels of deafness. All experienced in sign language. The teacher who taught the workshops presented and discussed proposals for writing, in Sign Language and then started the writing. The workshop room was quite large. The students' desks were organized in a circle, since, that way, everyone could see each other, which helped communication in sign language. In an effort to make reading a part of the everyday life of these students, the teacher chose to update the murals with texts written in Portuguese, such as text clippings from mass circulation newspapers.

In general, class time was divided as follows: 30 minutes for the roll call and class organization; one hour for discussion of texts handed out in the previous class; 30 minutes to present the writing proposal of the day and one and a half hours for the writing of the new essay. It is important to note that, during the time that the students wrote the essays, the teacher made her computer available so that the students could research, on the Internet, meanings, images and synonyms of the words they did not know. The students wrote the text and the teacher corrected the initial text versions, making use of notes, after which the students were asked to make the necessary adjustments when rewriting the same text.

To preserve the informant´s identity, we decided to call him Daniel. The adolescent sought the writing workshop because he received a very negative assessment of his ability to write during an internship interview. He is part of the world´s population of deaf students who, in the transition from equivalent levels in high school to university, finds a wide range of barriers to his participation in the classroom, such as functional, environmental and ones related to student attitude (Powell, Hyde, & Punch, 2014).

Daniel presents profound bilateral deafness since birth. He was chosen for this case study because he excelled at the workshop due to his persistence and tenacity in learning how to write. He was very willing to participate in the research and, together with his parents, signed a free and informed consent form, the standard procedure of the Group of Studies and Research Written Production and Psychoanalysis - GEPPEP,² in which the authors were included at the time of the undertaking of the study. Both he and his parents were interviewed for biographical data. The interviews were recorded and later summarized for the purpose of constructing the research participant´s profile.

Daniel is fluent in Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) since childhood. Throughout his life, he did not learn to utter words in Portuguese. Judging by studies that show there is a correlation between willingness to learn the oral modality of a language and its writing (Marschark, Shaver, Nagle, & Newman, 2015), Daniel could be considered a strong candidate for failure in the writing workshop. In fact, at the beginning of the research, when he was 16 and a second-year high school student, his difficulty in writing in Portuguese was great. Thus, throughout the workshop, it would be necessary not only to teach him the technical aspects of writing in that language, but also to overcome, at least to some extent, the negative historical relationship that the deaf communities have established with the Portuguese language (Lodi, Bortolotti, & Cavalmoreti, 2014).

The boy had studied from kindergarten to high school at a traditional school for the deaf in São Paulo, in which all activities were adapted for the deaf. Being the only deaf person in his family, he always had the support and dedication of his parents., Part of the sound communication in his house had a visual version. For example, we can mention the adaptation made to the doorbell of the family residence: when it makes a sound as soon as it is activated, it also lights a colored bulb. The deep concern of Daniel's parents made them quickly learn sign language. They searched for deaf people organized in communities and asked to be taught along with their son.

The corpus of this research was made up of 29 versions of produced texts by the student throughout the workshop. They correspond to 3 attempts to fulfill what was requested between the second and ninth proposals and an attempt to fulfill the first and last drafting proposals.

The analysis of the text versions was carried out by comparing them with the complete text, with emphasis on the development of the titles and their relation with the texts named. In addition to the teacher of the workshop and an external researcher to the pedagogical relationship (both authors of this article), the texts were analyzed by assistant researchers, who had been specially invited for this purpose.

Daniel´s unique journey

Daniel´s writing underwent important transformations throughout the workshop. Initially incomprehensible in the eyes of the reader, its production gave way to meaningful texts for a larger audience. The main changes were: 1) attention to the spelling of the words; 2) use of paragraphs; 3) title refinement; 4) calculation of the reader's interpretation; 5) use of connectives; 6) verbal conjugation; and 7) syntax.

In order to show the extent of Daniel's development, two of his texts can be seen in Table 1: the first, written in February 2013, and the last, on August 26th, 2013.

Table 1
original handwritten version of Daniel's first and last texts

Before comparing the two texts, the first analysis is related to the change in the number of spelling marks made by the teacher in the first and last text written by Daniel. While we observe eight elements circled in red, as well as the presence of doubtful scores, or underlined words in the first version, these same marks have disappeared from the last version.

The second analysis is that in both texts Daniel was careful to use contextualizing elements. In both, for example, the writing proposal is transcribed. Looking at the first text, we also verified another contextualization factor: the transcription of the proposal was preceded by the date that the task was requested.

Having said that, for the reader's comfort, Tables 2 and 3 bring the diplomatic transcription of the texts, the handwritten version of which was presented in Table 1.

Table 2
Diplomatic transcription of the first text written by Daniel

1	Title
2	Teetch teacher clear word
3	significants to learn future expectation
4	hope like to know. Hope espect
5	to hope blackboard teach students. I’m
6	deaf chiled mummy siky baby
7	tummy, birth deaf School Ov
8	er School always special together
9	deaf friend Libras cool. Now school
10	to finish end year and to ask and nowe to do
11	what adults to write urgent. Leesaners
12	to think deaf what moron to write wrongs
13	to know little difference language now
14	To write rite really want.
15	Worksop to think car funny here
16	Worksop to write perfect Portuguese.
17	To understand future computer work.
18	tidy perfumed to work admins
19	office future boss secretary me
20	now write right not have. Want
21	to nead write am stubborn deaf to learn.
22	Teacher workshop laugh group leesaners
23	deaf teacher to mix everybody speak
24	everybody equal I to say hand friends mouth
25	she hand and mouth spoke can leg
26	body all inportante communication
27	to happen Always. Teacher say focus
28	writing, hope learn what it means
29	of focus is. Future only, Bye

Table 3
Diplomatic transcription of the last text written by Daniel

1	To write with of happiness!
2	Today I am happy and sad. Sad because last Workshop
3	of Writing I wanted more. Happy because I learnt.
4	much. I learnt various things: verbs, phrase order
5	new words and a lot more. Difficulty I before did not
6	used to think reader, now I ev even to like like!
7	Before I was very afraid, thought moron because
8	reason deaf and know few word, but I learnt
9	that everyone also does not to find it easy to write
10	So all right!!!
11	To write important and to state thought and opinion
12	and always to be friend of reader. To keep your thought
13	for always on paper. Very good!!!
14	I to know know that I am bad a little, but tea-
15	cher said every everyone to be is bad
16	a little too. Now listeners have clear my
17	text and I to be will be am happy
18	I think to write with words like puzzle
19	person to keep thinking in pieces and trying together
20	feet fit until to manage.
21	I like to write and also to write again until
22	get it right! Libras is my passion, but Portuguese is cool
23	too. Thank you with heart and bye

Comprised of 29 handwritten lines, Daniel's text is about his expectations of taking part in the writing workshop. The text is not divided into paragraphs. The document is marked by difficulties related to syntax and by the absence of prepositions, conjunctions, articles, gender marking and verbal conjugation. Therefore, Daniel produces a text that literature has described as being able to be included in the group of typical deaf subjects, that is, texts marked by: a) diverse syntax; article and preposition suppression; infinitive verbal form use; non-gender marking; etc. (Quadros, 1997); or, consequently, b) the understanding which becomes fragile without direct interaction with the participant (Almeida, Filasi, & Almeida, 2010).

At first, demonstrating that he has already learned a textual mask, Daniel tries to use a contextualization factor: he inserts the word "title" in the place where the writing of a title would have been expected. Therefore, we can infer that, at the beginning of the writing workshop, the student superficially understands the need to contextualize his text, or does not know how to do it.

In lines 1 to 5, the student seems to produce variations around the theme that is present in the writing proposal. In a visible metonymic contamination of the proposed keyword, we find "expectation" (line 3), "hope", "hope", "I hope" (line 4), "I hope" (line 4), and "to hope" ( line 5). It is as if, finding it difficult to name the theme, an operation inscribed in the metaphor field, Daniel is impelled towards a metonymic slip, when presenting the theme of his writing.

He then goes back to the origins of his deafness (lines 05 to 07); describes his special school studies (lines 08 and 09); writes about his questions on adulthood due to the closure of the school year (lines 9 to 11); and denounces the listeners’ position in relation to the deaf (11 to 13). In doing so, it approaches the declarative position adopted by the writers whose narratives were analyzed by Müller and Karnopp (2015), who in their writing pointed out a "binary opposition between a listener and a deaf person, in which the cultural relation difference between 'two worlds' and the quest for 'normality' "(emphasis in the original) (pg.1064) is distinct.

Afterwards, he shows his desire to learn how to write (line 14); shares his willingness to work in the administrative area (lines 17 to 19); and continues to recognize the need to learn Portuguese (lines 20 and 21). Some parts also offer interpretation difficulties, for example, lines 24 to 26: "everybody equal I to speak hand friend mouth and all right cool be able leg body all important communication".

At the conclusion of the text, Daniel regains the perspective, which was present at the beginning, citing, in line 28, the word "hope". Now he claims to know what it means. Having mentioned the teacher's advice to "focus on writing" (line 27), the boy says that for him to have hope means, in future, to "focus" only on writing (line 29).

Regarding the last of Daniel's texts that comprise the corpus, let us remember that it was produced in response to the question "what is my perception about writing after participating in the writing workshops?".

In this text, the student expresses his feelings regarding the period in which he devoted himself to writing in the writing workshop context. After the reproduction of the writing proposal, a contextualization factor appears: the title "Write with joy". Unlike what happened in the first texts, he demonstrates the importance of relating a title to the text, even speeding up the expectations of those who have read it. Based on this title, Daniel points to what he thinks has been the main achievement of the writing workshop: to have changed the way he relates to writing.

Daniel claims to have mixed feelings (of happiness and sadness) (lines 2 to 4) and then lists some of his learning processes (lines 4 and 5), comparing before and after his Portuguese language learning (Lines 5 and 6). He also compares the image he had of the deaf with the one he formed after the workshop (lines 7 to 10). He goes on to summarize the main lesson learned in writing about the roles of the writer and the reader of the text (lines 11 to 13). He continues to present a self-assessment of the current state of his writing skills (lines 14-17). Before concluding the text, he also makes a comparison between writing and jigsaw puzzles, by which he shows that he has understood the work involved in writing (lines 18 to 20). He completes his text, sharing his taste for writing (lines 21-22), and finally saying goodbye and thanking the teacher for her work (line 23).

Nevertheless, we find, that Daniel fulfills all the requirements proposed by Charolles (1989) for the establishment of coherence in the text "Write with joy". The answer to the meta- rule repetition can be found, for example, in the recovery of the terms "happy" and "sad" to explain what he intended to mean with each of these words (lines 2 and 3).

Progression can be perceived, for example, when the term "thought" is recovered. In its first citation (line 11), the term referred to the importance of expressing thoughts and, in the recovery (line 12), it deals with writing as a record of thoughts. With the complete reading of the text, one will not find any moments when a situation or affirmation that is contrary to itself occurred. Therefore, it is possible to conclude that attendance to the non-contradiction rule can also be observed. The relation however is marked, for example, by the adversative conjunction "but" (lines 8 and 14) and also by the expressions "before" and "now" (lines 5, 6, 7 and 16).

Having said that, we can compare how Daniel expresses his affections with regard to the writing in the first and last text drafted in the workshop. If, before, the predominant affection was fear, now, he decides to no longer be intimidated. This change becomes clearer if we compare two statements, taken from the first and last of his written texts, respectively:

• Statement 1: "Listeners to think deaf what a moron to write wrong ".

• Statement 2: “Before I was very afraid, thought moron because reason deaf and know few words, but I learnt that everybody also does not to find it easy to write”.

In statement 1, Daniel voices an opinion that judges and condemns the deaf. Assigned to the listeners, it marks a position whereby the deaf have cognitive problems (they are morons) and consequently cannot learn to write.

In statement 2, the same voice is conferred to a Daniel who existed before having participated in writing workshops. The Daniel, that was founded after the workshops, reads the first Daniel’s affection in terms of "fear". He explains that the reason for assigning the "moron" attribute to the deaf is due to the small size of his lexicon, and later shares the fact that he has learned that writing difficulties are not exclusive to the deaf., the two statements are also very diverse linguistically. From 1 to 2, the syntax gains difficulty - Daniel constructs a causal coordinated clause, followed by another adversative one, the verbs become more precise in temporal labeling, etc.

In this context, the change regarding what a workshop means to Daniel is also highlighted. It can be seen by comparing statements 3 and 4, also taken from the first and last of the texts written by the student, respectively:

• Statement 3: “Workshop to think car funny here workshop to write perfect Portuguese”.

• Statement 4: "Sad because last Writing Workshop I wanted more".

Statement 3 shows the presence of a kind of meta-declarative remark (Authier-Revuz, 1988). It comes back to Daniel's remark on the strangeness of the word "workshop." Until that moment, for him, the word referred to a place where cars are taken when they present problems. So he shares the fact that he thinks it is "funny" that the same word is used to designate the place where one will learn to write in Portuguese.

This strangeness disappears in statement 4, now, with an understanding of what a writing workshop is, Daniel simply confines himself to sharing the affections fostered in him due to the end of his work: "sorrow" and "desire (want more)".

In short, comparing the first and the last versions of the texts he wrote, we realized that the pedagogical work accomplished allowed him to break off from the never-ending contemporaniety (Riolfi, 2014) of his relation with the Portuguese Language. The main changes were:

1. use of paragraphs: if, at the beginning his texts tended to be written in a single block, in the end they came to have paragraphing in the appropriate places, denoting an effort to divide the written text into logical blocks;

2. attention to the spelling of words: if, at the beginning metonymic logic prevailed, from which Daniel derived words that did not exist in the Portuguese language from those that actually exist (for example, "I espect" of "expectation"), at the end of the process, only problems, common to all writers, remain, such as foreign origin word spelling, for example "shoppig";

3. calculation of the reader’s interpretation: in the first versions of his texts, we have writing that denotes its author’s difficulty, in realizing that the reader can hardly interpret the writing without the active participation of who wrote it. This situation changed during the workshop. In the last text he produced, Daniel explains his current taste of thinking about the reader during the act of writing, stating " I before did not think reader, now I ev even to like like it!";

4. syntax difficulty, with an emphasis on verbal conjugation: Daniel's texts most likely lost their incomprehensible appearance as they approached the typical phrasal structure of the Portuguese language (subject + verb + object) and gained conjugated verbs in time, modes and people which are more or less appropriate for each of the contexts; and finally;

5. increased use of connectives: connectives were always present in Daniel's texts, but they became more numerous and better used as he began to carry out re-contextualization activities (Marcuschi, 2001). For example, the following connectives appear in the texts reproduced in this article: "And", "but", "because", "so", "that";

6. fewer non-appropriate expression transcriptions for writing: another important achievement for the specific case of deaf people has been to understand that words or important expressions to the context of face-to-face communication, do not, in most cases, have to be produced in the written version of a text (Nunes & Vargas, 2016).

The writing of titles by a deaf student

The comparison of Daniel´s text versions showed an expressive difference in the way of conceiving and constructing his titles. The first element highlighted by the reading of the titles is the fact that Daniel came to understand one of the important functions of the titles of essay texts: pointing out the author's position on the themes dealt with in his work (Van Dijik, 1990 ).

It was not a spontaneous achievement. When the teacher of the workshops came into contact with Daniel's difficulty of conceiving what a title is, she began to devote special attention to the topic, highlighting it in the classroom discussions. In what follows, we will analyze some of the procedures, making them the focal point, not due to their actual application, but rather by what, retroactively, can be gathered from their effects on the participant's production (Riolfi & Andrade, 2016a).

For example, the teacher took a number of magazines from the most varied segments (cars, soap opera, science, tourism) to the classroom. They were distributed among the students and, with the analysis of the titles there, showed how they are usually conceived, taking into account the impacts that there will be on the reader when choosing a title.

Initially, Daniel did not know the function of text titles. He did not recognize the importance of naming a text and did not know how to do it. In the single version of his first work and in the first version of the second work, he simply copied the word "title", initially written by the teacher on the chalkboard, at the top of his essay sheet.

The presence of a proper title occurred only in the third version of the second work, written in answer to the question "Is there an exaggeration in the relation between human beings and pets?", due to a dialectical movement established with the teacher, which can be shown in Table 4.

Table 4
The teacher´s reaction to the titles of the text versions

Version 1

Version 2

Version 3

Reading Table 4, we noticed that, when correcting the student’s first version, the teacher circled the word "title" and wrote "here you should put the name of your text". Thus, the teacher established a correlation between the word "title" and the word "name," which in his/her assessment would be informing the student about expectations of how texts should be named.

The maneuver did not have the desired effect. In the second attempt to write, instead of creating a title for his work, Daniel used verbatim "the name of your text" statement to name the work. We can thus observe a divergence of interpretation between the teacher's perspective and Daniel's. The teacher's statement, in her perspective, pointed to the need to create a title. For the student, instead of writing "title" at the top of the sheet, it pointed to the need of, writing down "the name of your text". Having come across Daniel´s difficulty to make inferences, the teacher chose to question him. Tracing an arrow from the place where the expression "The name of your text" was found, the teacher asked "what's the name? ".

This intervention however worked. Having come across the interrogative pronoun "which," Daniel was led to ponder over the need to choose a name to be assigned to a text. Consequently, he came to understand that copying the word "name" would not suffice, but rather, he would need to create a title for the text. Thus, the third version of his text received the title " animals to live home and human exaggerations".

In order to make it possible to assess the relevance of this first title, Table 5 reproduces Daniel’s whole text.

Table 5:
Third version of Daniel´s second text

	1	Animals to live home and exaggeration hum-
	2	Ans
	3	To have debates house animals care
	4	Many
	5	Tatiane student to say yes like cats
	6	perfumed to go for a walk shoppig like person
	7	Other I opinion animal free same as forest
	8	Natural too much right of course wrong Tatiane.
	9	To have companies make money careful
	10	house animals different forest animals I
	11	agree straight to work only wrong suffer
	12	clothes tight hurt colored little bows of
	13	pink reason not be person
	14	To take natural animal and to take home care
	15	Family to remember always are to be person to be
	16	animal freedom.
	17	To train pee backyard forbidden barking at
	18	night.
	19	Wrong birthday party congratulations
	20	too absurd same as exaggerated dog love
	21	human ration love Brigadeiro3

The third version of Daniel´s text, made up of 21 handwritten lines, including the title, responds affirmatively to the developing question "Is there an exaggeration in the relationship between humans and pets?".

We can see that the student's choice of the title is consistent. The expression "animals to live house", first part of the title, can be read as a reference to domestic animals. Thus the following phrase, "human exaggerations", indicates that the student considers that there are exaggerations by people regarding pets. Therefore, the title consists of an affirmative answer to the question in the drafting proposal.

Throughout the text, Daniel mentions several elements that are arguments in favor of his thesis advocating the existence of exaggerations in this relationship: the fact that excessive animal care is related to corporate profits (line 9); the use of clothes that hurt the animals (line 12), or are not appropriate, such as pink little bows (lines 12 and 13); disrespect for the free nature of animals (line 16); and misconceived behavior such as holding birthday parties for animals (lines 19 to 21). Thus, through the relation of meanings existing between the writing proposal, - the chosen title and the written text, - coherence is established.

We can see, in Table 6, how the teacher reacted to the achievement of textual competence regarding Daniel's titles.

Table 6
Comments from Daniel´s teacher

	1	Hi
	2	Your final text was very good! Congratulations!
	3	In these last weeks you learnt:
	4	-Title
	5	-Paragraphs
	6	-More words in Portuguese
	7	-To think about the reader
	8	For the next paragraphs our focus will be
	9	Punctuation. Ok?
	10	See you!

In a ten-line note, the teacher establishes the dialogue by means of a greeting (line 1); recognizes a positive judgment in relation to the text written by the student (line 2) and then goes on to explain which were the achievements he made in the context of the writing workshop (lines 3 to 7). The construction of titles is the first of these items. The teacher finishes her feedback informing the student that the punctuation will be the next aspect to be worked on (lines 8 and 9). Therefore, we can say that the essence of her note is close to what Riolfi and Andrade (2016b) have classified as interventions related to knowledge, those that somehow realign the way in which the student relates to the things to be learnt. Finally, the teacher says goodbye, reinforcing the establishment of the interlocution (line 10).

By providing a comparison of the proposed questions with the titles of Daniel’s final text versions, Table 7 allows one to consider how much understanding in terms of what a title is, was maintained throughout the workshop.

Table 7
Titles of the Daniel’s final text versions

	Proposed issue	Title of the final version
1	What are your expectations about writing workshops?	Title
2	Is there an exaggeration in the relationship between men and pets?	Animals live home and human exaggeration
3	Technology and privacy invasion	My life be mine
4	Man: the planet's enemy	S.O.S. Planet Earth
5	Happiness: between having and being	Happiness and sadness
6	Moral values and their importance in society.	Importance moral values
7	Graffiti: between vandalism and art	Graffiti is Art of the City
8	The future of art.	The books in the future
9	Flattery: virtue or defect?	Flattery: Factory Defect
10	The issue of forest fires in Brazil	Burning Brazil's future
11	What is your perception about writing?	Write with happiness!

Reading Table 7, we can see that, to a greater or lesser extent, all the titles attributed to the texts point to the position that the student takes in relation to the proposed question as a motto for textual production. We will exclude the titles given to the first, second and eleventh tasks from the analysis that follows, since they have already been commented previously.

Third task: Daniel positions himself in a way that is contrary to the invasion of privacy potentially provided by technology. By means of the title "my life to be mine," he creates an expectation that elements, which lead towards the understanding of a position contrary to the invasion of privacy, will be found in his text.

Fourth task: Daniel tries to persuade the reader to adopt a perspective according to which, it is necessary to defend the planet considering the harmful effects of the presence of man on it. Thus, the title "S.O.S Planet Earth" is supported in order to summon the reader to act in favor of the planet.

Fifth task: Daniel does not agree with the holistic perspective that emerges from the proposed theme, according to which, by making the right choice, a person could find their happiness. From the title "Happiness and sadness", it appears that, for the student, there would be no possibility of finding complete happiness.

Sixth task: Daniel agrees with the current perspective of the proposed theme. Thus, its title indicates that moral values, in his assessment, are important.

Seventh task: Daniel, starting from the title on, indicates that he goes beyond the perspective that is present in the proposal. In a highly persuasive way, he built his title in the form of a thesis, according to which urban art, ultimately, is graffiti.

Eighth task: for Daniel, a book is the object of art that, essentially, should last until the future. This is the perspective announced in the title of the text.

Ninth task: based on the title "Flattery: Factory defect", Daniel not only responded to the proposed question, but also shared his position by using the popular expression "factory defect", according to which it is difficult to combat this type of defect.

Tenth task: with the title "Burning Brazil´s Future", Daniel indicates his position, according to which people are destroying not only the forests but, consequently, the Country´s future. Notice the subtlety of the use of the connotative sense (metaphorical) of the verb "burn", somewhat sophisticated for beginner writers, who tend to limit themselves to the denotative sense (Riolfi & Magalhães, 2008).

That said, in order for us to evaluate the ways in which the final versions of the titles of Daniel's texts were constructed, we share the titles he gave to all text versions produced during the writing workshops in Table 8.

Table 8
Titles of text versions

	Version 01	Version 02	Version 03
1	Title	***	***
2	Title	The name of your text	Animals live home and human exaggerate
3	Private life interests not you	Private life me not	“My life to be mine”?
4	Planet finished	Planet almost to finish	S.O.S. Planet Earth
5	Happiness	Sadness	Happiness and sadness
6	Moral Important	Moral importance	The importance of moral values
7	Graffiti Art city	Graffiti to be City Art	Graffiti is City Art
8	Books	Books in Future	“Books in the future”?
9	Flattery: factory defect	Flattery: Factory Defect.	Flattery: Factory Defect.
10	Burn the country future	Burning the Future Country	Burning Brazil's Future
11	Write with happiness!	***	***

Comparing the titles of the three versions of text produced by Daniel, we can see by the movements carried out that there was an attempt to arouse the reader's interest in his texts. Thus, in addition to mastering the formal mechanisms for naming texts, Daniel comes to understand the importance of calculating the presence of a reader and offering him/her cues to interpret the text to be read.

The text versions produced in response to the ninth drafting proposal were the only ones that did not change with the rewriting of the versions. Except for what occurred in the fifth task, in which the final version of the title was set up based on the integration of the two previously proposed titles, all the others kept the original ideas in the rewriting. Nonetheless, they have undergone important refinements regarding the presentation form. We note for example, changes in syntax and addition of elements. He seems to have assimilated the concern about making the title more comprehensible to the reader.

In the text versions written in response to the third task, for example, we realize that in the course of writing, the student reconsiders how he expressed his position regarding the theme "environmental preservation". From the first to the second version, a linguistic modality was introduced by means of the adverb "almost", understood as a mark that imprints the speaker in his/her utterance to varying degrees (Bally, 1950). From the second to the third version, Daniel seems to have opted for a title that can be interpreted by readers willing to collaborate with reading.

To conclude: LIBRAS my passion, but Portuguese cool too

Given the results obtained by Daniel after a relatively short course, it should be said that deafness is not an impediment in the achievement of contextualization factors for the learning of Portuguese language writing

However, in the section intended for the presentation of the research participant, we mentioned that, in his case, in addition to dealing only with the technical aspects related to learning the written modality of the Portuguese language, it also seemed necessary to focus on changing his stance in order to change a negative historical relation continuity that deaf communities have established with the Portuguese Language (Lodi et al., 2014). .

Therefore, before concluding, it is necessary to clarify the main limit of the investigation presented here. It is difficult for listening researchers to understand what it is like to write without the support of oral language, no matter how hard they try to understand the ways in which a deaf person writes. We are used to thinking in a certain way, according to which, when writing, we can count on the repertoire that reaches us through our ears, both in terms of content and in terms of expression modes.

Having said that, we can explain two fundamental aspects for the teaching of the Portuguese language to deaf students.

The first is the nature of the partnership established by the teacher. More than pointing out the mistakes made by the student in writing, she would question, provoke reflection. Thus, we understand that the interference of the teacher was essential for the student to construct a true learning process, based on a joint effort, in which restructuring, asking and taking risks were part of their writing process, collaborating towards the refinement of textual competence.

The second deals with the rewriting movement. We consider that when a student is summoned to rewrite, he is being invited to learn as well. As Daniel wrote in one of his writings, the rewriting resembles the assembly of a jigsaw puzzle. And it is in this movement of finding the piece that best fits, among many others that the exercise of learning how to write, can be found.

Thus, we hope that the effort undertaken in this work can contribute to the discussions about the writing of deaf people, in order to point out the importance of all deaf students trying out the experience of discovering writing. May our case study also serve as a motivation for the deaf, who may still feel lonely on this journey, which is to write in Portuguese.

• 1
  English version: Deirdre Giraldo - [e-mail].
• 2
  More information can be found at: http://paje.fe.usp.br/~geppep/.
• 3
  Brigadeiro is a Brazilian sweet made of chocolate and sweet condensed milk. T/N

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Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  04 July 2019
• Date of issue
  2019

History

• Received
  17 Oct 2017
• Reviewed
  19 Dec 2017
• Accepted
  06 Feb 2018