Teaching the verb to be to deaf learners through Colombian sign language

Abstract

This research intends to be a guide for ESL teachers, schools or any institution that would like to include deaf people in their classrooms. Inclusion of people with special abilities is an increasing concern in current Colombian research. This is because of the need to provide everyone the same quality of education. The purpose of this study is to support foreign language teachers that work with the deaf community in the preliminary process of learning the verb to be. The problem of this study comes from my own experience working with the deaf community and the questioning of the verb to be itself because as you will see later in this paper, it is omitted in the Colombian Sign language. This qualitative research was carried out with 10 deaf adults between the ages of 18 and 60. The data of this research was taken in Journals written by the teacher at the end of each class, video recorded interviews that were later analyzed because of Sign Language use and an English test at the end of the process. After I analyzed the data, I concluded that there was not a clear signifier of the verb “be” and as the verb to be was the only topic I taught them, they expressed that there is a dependence of the subjects and the verb to be. However, the data shows that there is still a confusion of the concept of “being” as they do not have a sign that represents it. Keywords: inclusion, deaf, deafness verb to be, Colombian sign language, visual approach, English as a Foreign Language (EFL)