Course Description
Students will progress from intermediate to intermediate-advanced ASL skills and increase their vocabulary. They will enhance their skills for narration, particularly role-shifting techniques, and they will increase their understanding of variety of register and tone in ASL. Students will continue to build knowledge about Deaf cultural norms for interaction.
Course Content
Sentence structures, vocabulary and narrative techniques:
- Role-shifting with matching eye gaze
- Constructed dialogue and constructed action
- Time/tense markers and use of timelines
- Verb modulation for temporal aspect
- Sentences that include a condition and a consequence
Pluralization:
- Noun repetition and/or indexing
- Plural classifiers – general and number-specific
- ASL quantifying vocabulary, e.g., many, much
Expansion of knowledge of ASL’s numbering systems:
- ASL vocabulary for ranking, e.g., top, most, oldest, best
- Ordinal numbers for ranking
- ASL depictions of ratios and fractions
Narrating interesting facts and unfortunate moments:
- Discourse markers for sudden incidents
- Verbs that depict upset plans
- Emotive aspect and emphasis
Explaining a set of game rules:
- Describing the objective
- Describing the game elements
- Discourse markers to show sequencing
Introduction to Deaf sports organizations and events:
- Local, provincial, national, international
Learning Activities
Class activities may include lecture and language lab, demonstration/modelling, dialogue and small group conversational practice, course readings and videos among others.
Means of Assessment
This course will conform to the Douglas College Evaluation policy regarding the number and weighting of evaluations. Typical means of evaluation may include a combination of:
- Quizzes to evaluate factual knowledge of ASL & Deaf culture
- Quizzes to evaluate receptive ASL skills
- Demonstration of expressive ASL skills
- Assigned dialogues and interaction
- Attendance and participation
A sample grade breakdown for this course might be as follows:
Video assignment 1: 20%
Video assignment 2: 20%
Mid-term exam 1: 20%
Mid-term exam 2: 20%
Final exam: 20%
Total: 100%
No single assignment will be worth more than 20%.
Learning Outcomes
Upon successful completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Demonstrate intermediate-advanced ASL narration skills to do the following:
- Use role-shifting to clearly depict characters in a narrative sequence
- Use appropriate eye gaze to match role-shifting
- Appropriately incorporate the narrative techniques of constructed dialogue and constructed action
- Choose appropriate discourse markers to indicate topic changes
- Use appropriate structure for conditional clauses
- Use a wide variety of classifiers
- Use a variety of pluralization techniques
- Recognise and use ASL ways of depicting rank, including ordinal numbers
- Use sequencing and discourse markers to explain a set of game rules
- Maintain appropriate temporal aspect and use time/tense markers
- Demonstrate the use of appropriate register in ASL when narrating or storytelling
- Demonstrate appropriate conversation strategies and reciprocal signals
- Demonstrate versatility in tone, eg. ability to narrate authoritatively or diplomatically
Textbook Materials
The instructor might choose an ASL textbook such as:
Smith, Cheri. (2008). Signing Naturally 3. Student Workbook. San Diego, CA: DawnSignPress.