This course is designed to build on and apply ASL conversational skills and cultural behaviors acquired from previous courses, ASL 101 and ASL 102 to a functional level that includes new expanded conversational and narrative skills using both concrete and abstract concepts. Students will continue to learn the units of the Signing Naturally curriculum, which uses the “functional-notional” approach where ASL grammatical principals are also emphasized in this course. This method focuses on the communicative purposes or “functions” of social interaction. The course incorporates interactive activities, which will encourage a natural language environment using the target language, American Sign Language by giving students situations, which allows them to concentrate on the purpose rather than the mechanics of the conversation. Students will also learn to tell stories, use the language in a variety of settings and study ASL grammatical rules with attention on non-manual features including non-manual grammatical signals, and prosodic features of intensity and characterization. Emphasis is placed on narrative receptive and expressive skill development. Attention is given to the basic discourse structures used in both dialogues and story-telling.

The intent of the course is to provide students with more opportunities and experiences to advance their receptive and expressive sign language skills, and learn more about American Deaf culture to allow for interactive opportunities with the Deaf Community. After completing this course students will be able to: