Sports, Physical Education, Olympic Games, and Brazil: The Deafness That Still Should Be Listened

Abstract

Since the sports and health-promoting activities have become part of modern civilization, Physical Education (PE) has become an important discipline that approaches these topics to the teenagers and children. PE introduces students to a wide range of sports, their rules and their relationship with health, from elementary to higher education levels. It also helps on discovering and training athletes for the Olympic Games, Paralympic Games and Deaflympics. For teaching PE and sports to deaf students, we should use sign language. Since Brazil will hold the Olympic Games in 2016, in this work we aim to survey for signs of 33 sports of the Olympic Games in Brazilian Sign Language (LIBRAS-LSB) and to verify their linguistic consistence for teaching deaf students and help on receiving deaf visitors at the time of the Olympic Games. According to our data, among the 33 sports selected for this study, only 10 are represented in LIBRAS according to dictionary Acessibilidade Brasil (http://www.acessobrasil.org.br) from the Brazilian National Institute of Education of Deaf (INES). Importantly, some signs do not strictly follow neither the LIBRAS grammatical structure nor the visual-motor feature related to the sport represented (e.g. Athletics). Among the 23 missing sports there included the Artistic Gymnastics and Sailing in which Brazil has held good athletes. The comparison of LSB with other sign languages from United States (ASL), France (FSL) and Spain (SSL) using Spread The Sign , an international dictionary (www.spreadthesign.com), revealed that some of these inconsistence also appears in another languages. Our data points to the urgent need for creating and/or organizing the Brazilian sports signs using a formal tool such as INES dictionary for teaching PE and using them at the time of the Olympic Games in Brazil.