La lengua de señas chilena, la cultura y la educación de las personas sordas en Chile

Abstract

This article presents dififerent studies on Chilean Sign Language, carried out since 1987, by the research team fforn the Linguistics Area of the Special Education Department of the Universidad Metropolitana de Ciencias de la Educación. Sign Language (ChSL) is the most important valué in the culture of deaf people in our country. It is their natural communication system, the symbol that identifies them as members of the deaf community, through which they build their identity as a
person. Most of the previous studies have focused on describing aspects of the dififerent levels of the language, with the objective of constructing its grammar. Other studies establish an approximation to understanding deaf people's world views. On the other land, due to the interest in leaming this language and the need for deaf instructors to be the ones responsible for its teaching, a project for deaf people was developed consisting of workshops, as a proposal for training that offers the foundations necessary to accomplish this duty in a satisfactory way. The dififerent studies have always involved the participation of deaf people, especially from the Association of Deaf People of Chile. As we are aware that these studies have been carried out from our perspective as people without hearing disabilities, we hope that, in the future, these studies are performed by deaf people themselves.