Deaf bilingual education has been building its history on a process of international dialogue about experiences from different countries and their unique trajectories of recognising the linguistic rights of deaf communities. This process began with the political mobilisation of deaf movements in defence of their civil rights, and was legitimised in the scientific field by academic research that subverted the dominant theoretical and conceptual models that only considered spoken languages.
From the beginning of the 1990s, and on the basis of the 1980’s Swedish model in deaf education (KYLE, 1987; see also SVARTHOLM, 2014), deaf education shifted from a total communication model of education to a bilingual and bimodal one, with many attempts in developing programs utilising sign languages as L1 languages to deaf children (BOUVET, 1990; MARSCHARK; TANG; KNOORS, 2014; MARSCHARK; LAMPROPOULOU; SKORDILIS, 2016; KURZ; GOLOS; KUNTZE et al., 2021; SNODDON; WEBER, 2021).
This shift was based on Cummins’ theory of linguistic interdependence, especially the Common Underlying Proficiency (CUP) according to which, crossing the threshold in development of a first language, aids in the acquisition of a second (CUMMINS, 2021). Thus, developing a threshold in one language — in the case of the deaf child, in a signed language — can aid the attainment of proficiency in another language — in this case, in a spoken language (and later, even in more). Thus, from the 1990s onwards, there is a large number of research (mainly coming from the USA in relation to the American Sign Language - ASL) demonstrating a correlation between deaf children’s fluency in a signed language (in ASL) and higher assessment tests for reading (the SAT - Scholastic Assessment Test used in school reading assessment; for a review see HUMPHRIES, 2014).
Linguistic research has been absorbed by educational systems since the early 1990s (GARCIA; BAKER, 1995; BAKER, 2001), and by different forms of bilingual programmes employed in different linguistic communities and socio-cultural educational contexts, in which different linguistic power relations and amounts of language teaching and learning are involved, requiring a pedagogy of language teaching, and a bilingual pedagogy emphasising the role of signed languages in teaching and learning.
To this day (2023), sign languages [...]
