“Is it to write Portuguese or Libras?”: nuances of translanguaging in deaf language education

ABSTRACT In this article, I analyze two moments of translanguaging interaction among deaf students and teachers performing collective productions of written texts in a Portuguese as a second language teaching program for both young and deaf adults. This analysis aimed to collaborate with a multifaceted understanding of the complex everyday realities of translanguaging (J. Lee, 2022) in deaf language education, since the concept has been gaining prominence in this field, along with other research traditions based on structuralist understandings of language. The translanguaging practices and strategies analyzed and discussed, supported by a theoretical-methodological and descriptively translanguaged research work, made visible the nuances of the deaf students’ - spatial, tensional/ideological and momentary - translanguaging as productive key resources for conducting the writing activity and for language learning. In this process, the analysis enabled to consider alternatives to conceptions already established such as linguistic competence, as an alternative to the notions arising from the concepts of interference and interlanguage traditionally employed in research (and practice) in deaf language education.