Bilingual deaf people of the Libras-Portuguese pair (QLSB): a proposal for the evaluation of profiles of bilinguals in the pair Libras-Portuguese

In this paper, the process of elaborating a language questionnaire for bilingual deaf people of the Libras-Portuguese pair (QLSB) is presented. Bilingualism is a complex phenomenon, which has innumerous dimensions (HAMERS; BLANC, 2000; WEI, 2013). One such dimension, for example, concerns the relation of balance and dominance among the bilingual’s languages. Considering Bilingualism and dominance as multifaceted constructs, we sought to design a questionnaire to assess the linguistic profile of bilingual deaf people. For the elaboration of the questionnaire, a broad review in the area was carried out for the proper delimitation of the construct and operationalization (BABBIE, 1999), and, afterward, the stages of the elaboration were fulfilled cf. Dörnyei (2003). The QLSB, which is a bilingual online questionnaire, is composed of 31 items, distributed in four modules - history, usage, proficiency and linguistic attitudes, as proposed by Birdsong et al. (2012). The questionnaire may be used by researchers in the field of Bilingualism, as well as in other applied contexts.