American Sign Language

CESC has designed this ASL programme in harmony with the standards of the American Sign Language 2024 (see ACTEL figure below). The American Sign Language 2024 estimates that each of the levels above requires some 60 to 90 hours of class and tutorials. By limiting content mostly to the acquisition of the language, CESC seeks to bring the programme in harmony with the expectations of the national cultural context. To this end, CESC recommends that participants maintain social bonds that would support their learning and maintenance of the language, along with using free online resources to enhance their fluency.

This programme is designed to focus on the ASL skills and competencies, in the shortest span of time. As such, while it follows the ASL guidelines terms of language and language skills acquisition, it will not include explicit classes on the history of ASL, the culture of signing and variations in its use. However, some elements of these areas will be covered organically in the programme, and participants will be encouraged to practice their skills as much as possible outside of class time.

The structure of the ASL programme offered in this programme:

• Novice I, II and III -- CESC will focus on ASL levels 1-3 in this programme.

• Intermediate I, II and III -- CESC will focus on ASL levels 4-6 in this programme.

• Advance I, II and III (ASL levels 7-9) -- not offered in this programme.

• Superior (ASL level 10) -- not offered in this programme.

Novice to Intermediate levels cover ASL history, importance, and structure; Deaf culture and community; Deaf awarenes; grammar and sentence structure, fingerspelling and numbers (1-10); facial expressions and body language, sign vocabulary and linguistic structure; Intermediate levels to cover: greetings and introductions; common phrases; numbers 11-100); days of the week and time-related signs; emotions; simple question words; pronouns; family and relationships; food and drink; everyday activities; description and colors; places and directions; health and body; time and weather; socializing and making plans.

American Sign Language (ASL) is a natural language that serves as the predominant sign language of Deaf communities in the United States and most of Anglophone Canada. ASL is a complete and organized visual language that is expressed by employing both manual and non manual features. Besides North America, dialects of ASL and ASL-based creoles are used in many countries around the world, including much of West Africa and parts of Southeast Asia. ASL is also widely learned as a second language, serving as a lingua franca. ASL is most closely related to French Sign Language (LSF). It has been proposed that ASL is a creole language of LSF, although ASL shows features atypical of creole languages, such as agglutinative morphology.

ASL originated in the early 19th century in the American School for the Deaf (ASD) in Hartford, Connecticut, from a situation of language contact. Since then, ASL use has been propagated widely by schools for the deaf and Deaf community organizations. Despite its wide use, no accurate count of ASL users has been taken. Reliable estimates for American ASL users range from 250,000 to 500,000 persons, including a number of children of deaf adults (CODA) and other hearing individuals.

Signs in ASL have a number of phonemic components, such as movement of the face, the torso, and the hands. ASL is not a form of pantomime, although iconicity plays a larger role in ASL than in spoken languages. English loan words are often borrowed through fingerspelling, although ASL grammar is unrelated to that of English. ASL has verbal agreement and aspectual marking and has a productive system of forming agglutinative classifiers. Many linguists believe ASL to be a subject–verb–object language. However, there are several alternative proposals to account for ASL word order.