Seminar: 10 hours per week
Class activities may include lecture and language lab, demonstration/modelling, dialogue and small group conversational practice, course readings and videos, among others.
Sentence structures, vocabulary and narrative techniques:
- Non-manual markers made with the mouth
- Facial grammar and emotive affect, including humour
- Constructed dialogue and constructed action, and accompanying eye gaze
- Time/tense markers and use of timelines
Building ASL vocabulary in specific settings:
- Health/medical – talking about health and basic medical concerns/experiences
- Educational – talking about school and university/college
- Math – continuing to expand fluency in ASL number depictions
- Community – talking about current and local events, organizations, places and issues
Increasing adaptability to diverse ASL users:
- Language use across the ASL-Contact-English continuum
- Variations due to demographics (age, background, geographical area)
Making clear visual sense:
- Topicalization and contextualization
- Consistency in use of referential space
- Level of visual detail
- Discourse markers, cohesion, prosody
- Overall meaning and intent, including humour
Upon successful completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Demonstrate fluent, advanced ASL narration skills to do the following:
- Incorporate appropriate use of non-manual markers in signed utterances;
- Fluently use all 7 expansion/contextualization techniques;
- Construct cohesive narrative discourse with appropriate discourse markers;
- Make clear visual sense;
- Use a rich, diverse, setting-specific ASL vocabulary;
- Use a variety of classifiers and locatives;
- Use 3D referential space consistently and effectively and;
- Use appropriate number formats for particular contexts.
- Analyze and critique one’s own recorded ASL narratives.
- Appropriately engage in effective peer-to-peer feedback.
- Identify one’s own focus areas for development and intensified practice.
- Adapt ASL usage to communicate with a variety of signed language users.
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
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%.
The instructor might choose an ASL textbook such as:
Smith, Cheri. (2008). Signing Naturally 3. Student Workbook. San Diego, CA: DawnSignPress.
MODL 2262 or Assessment