Adults with intellectual disability: aspects of alphabetization and literacy

Abstract

For scholars of Cultural-Historical Psychology, the changes in behavior that occur during the developmental process enable advances in the transformation of the child into a cultural adult. The higher mental processes – memory, perception, thought, imagination and will – provide the introduction into the world of symbols, which are mediated by sociocultural influences and governed by the laws of internalization. When language is imposed without connection to reality and without meaning, it becomes only a technical and mechanical skill, because students do not engage with the essence of language. From this premise, we aim, in this text, to reflect on the appropriation of reading and writing by adults with Intellectual Disability (ID). We thus developed a qualitative bibliographic study based mainly on the contributions of Vygotsky and Luria. We believe that little attention is given to written language as such, since, generally, the teacher begins with the technical aspect and forgets the social function for which writing was created, that is, for registration, expression, and communication, and this is aggravated when the student has ID. The study, supported by the assumptions of Historical-Cultural Psychology, evidenced, in the case of people with ID, in the face of a sociocultural environment in which mediators are scarce or nonexistent, with few opportunities for social interaction effectively offered, that it is the school, through formal instruction, that will enhance the formation of these linguistic signs, indispensable for the formation of scientific concepts.