Deaf people learning an L3 through New Literacies strengthened by arts

Abstract

New Literacies is an educational project designed to apply a pedagogical strategy in order to teach English as a third language to a deaf group of people from the foundation “Árbol de Vida” (FUNDARVID) in Bogotá. This strategy is focused on reading and writing skills strengthened by the use of arts to enhance the learning content, improving the communicative competence of the students bearing in mind the visual abilities that Deaf people develop through the acquisition of their mother tongue: Colombian Sign Language (LSC). Contributions from the theories proposed by Michael Halliday, Michel Foucault, Mel Ainscow and Lev Vygotsky were important to build a framework for this project. Through the design and application of this strategy, students worked on the representation of themselves as people with ideas and thoughts that can contribute to the society where they belong to. As a tool and as a result, the participants created works of art focused on their ideas that they want to show to the world. The proposal of this project emerges as an alternative to foster academic inclusion of the Deaf community in Bogotá, designing different activities that enrich the knowledge already existent to teach the new language. Even though some people think that English language is not useful for the deaf community, the members of FUNDARVID demonstrated that this is an important tool for their development as professionals, as persons and as members of a community.