This paper analyzes the interactions in sign language (SL) among deaf elementary school students in Portuguese language classes and was inspired by the work of Donato (1994), who sought to identify scaffolding practices in interactions among peers in French as a second language classes. Applying the social interactionist approach (Vygotsky, 1988; Wood, Brunner and Ross, 1976), the present research analyzed the interactions between deaf students during the development of a teaching unit that encouraged them to write a letter of complaint, in Portuguese, about their school. It is possible to perceive how the scaffolding strategies made the construction of collective learning to perform the proposed task possible.
Collective scaffolding; Portuguese language for the deaf; Deaf education; Social interactionist theory
