Términus Framework – Virtual Communities of Practice as support to the Sign

Language terminological repertoire expansion

Daniela Satomi Saito1, Elisa Maria Pivetta2, Vania Ribas Ulbricht3, Marianne Rossi Stumpf3
1
Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of Santa Catarina – Campus Palhoça Bilíngue
(Libras/Portuguese), Palhoça, Brazil
2
Federal University of Santa Maria, Santa Maria, Brazil
3
Federal University of Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, Brazil
daniela.saito@ifsc.edu.br, elisa.pivetta@ufsm.br, {vrulbricht, stumpfmarianne}@gmail.com

The exercise of citzenship is a need and is visibly present in civil, socioe-conomics and
politcal rights. Contemporary discussions point that, for the full exercise of this right,
besides access to information and knowledge, should incorporate the ability to
interpretate reality and sensemaking, making citzens able to construct meaning and
build their critical thinking [1] [2] [3]. The deaf have their own culture and its
characteristic is marked by its different form of communication that is held in Sign
Language (SL). However, for a long period of history, the Brazilian Sign Language
(Libras) was devaluated and forcibly excluded from social spaces, including educational
spaces. As a result of the historical process, its common to identificate concepts of
speciality areas that do not have specific terminology in Libras. The absence of signs
has a direct impact over the access to knowledge more naturally to the deaf in various
contexts. In this sense, Stumpf, Oliveira and Miranda [4] point to the need to expand the
terminological repertoire of Libras to facilitate the direct communication in sign
language, the comprehension of concepts, as well as enhacing the use of Libras in
academic spaces. The scientific community has converged efforts in search of the
developement of the repertoire and pointed to the importance of the participation of the
deafs in the terminology developement processes of Libras [5]. However, the process
has not been as efficient due to the low dissemination of the records of the language and
the difficulty of interaction between the different communities in Brazil involved in this
processes, which is implicated in diffuse creation of signs or propositions that generate
misunderstandings on concepts. Considering the exposed, the internet presents relevant
elements to propose solutions. In addition to supporting the creation of participatory
environments of facilitated social exchanges, like the virtual communities of practice, it
is flexible to suit to the characteristics of audiences with different profiles, such as the
deafs. So, this work aims to present a conceptual framework for Virtual Communities of
Practice, named Términus, aiming to support the Sign Language terminological
repertoire expansion. The methodological procedure involved a literature review in
order to see how the literature has addressed this issue; and an ethnografic study
conduced in a presential community of practice that works in the developement of
terminologies in sign language. The literature review identified a lack of initiatives to
encourage the development of proposals based on the web. In addition, among the
localized proposals, were not identified elements related to a collective meaning making
process, that is of major importance to avoid misconceptions in the development and
proposal of a new term. The ethnographic study, in turn, enabled perform the mapping
of individual and collective practices, the definition of a workflow in a terminological
development process in the context of a virtual community of practice and identify the
relations between the participants of the process. The alignment of the studies
culminated in the proposal of the conceptual framework Términus, that was used as
reference to implement a functional prototype named as MooBi (Bilingual Moodle).
This prototype was evaluated by interaction using think aloud protocol and
questionaries. The analysis of the evaluations validated the applicability of the
framework for the development of virtual communities of practice envirments to
support interaction between communities and the collaborative development of
terminologies based on the web. Besides that, the participants of the evaluation pointed
issues related to the development of a national platform for indexing and disseminate
the developed repertoire, indicating the need to continue the researches with this
purpose.

References

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