Teaching materials for deaf education: what do we have and what do deaf students need?

We present some results of a study on teaching material use in deaf education. Four Dutch and six Brazilian deaf school teachers when asked about which teaching materials they had, how they selected these materials, and what they thought about them. The interviews with Dutch teachers took place in 2016, and the data from the Brazilian teachers have been collected since 2016. For this study, we considered the didactic and pedagogical resources in which the learning of oral and signed languages takes place. The teachers were asked about the characteristics of their students, their perspectives, and challenges in bilingual education. In addition, we intended to understand the teaching materials chosen for teaching their deaf students according to these perspectives: a) how and why they were selected?; and b) did the materials foster the development of writing, reading, speaking and signing skills for their deaf students? Also, the teachers talked about the language proficiency of their students in order to say how they assess the students' writing, reading, speaking and signing skills and how they actually interpret the evaluation results. Hence, our presentation clarifies the position of these deaf students' teachers regarding their teaching and learning contexts, considering their students, their perspectives on bilingual learning, the teaching materials they use and the results of their students' language proficiency. These data will allow us to know and understand more about which are the appropriate teaching materials for Brazilian and Dutch deaf students and how they actually contribute to schooling and learning oral and sign languages. Consequently, the results will lead to actions that aim for (re)thinking school proposals, in pursuance of planning and developing teaching materials that explore and focus on the real needs of deaf students.