About American Sign Language Teaching Services
American Sign Language is designed to introduce a visual-gestural language used by the Deaf Community in Canada and the United States. Students will focus on the basic conversational skills, emphasizing receptive and expressive abilities.
The courses stress a functional/notional approach, and give practice for visual/gestural communication followed by comprehension skills and grammatical structures. Communicative competence in ASL ultimately depends on one’s capabilities to satisfactorily progress through structured activities in a series of ASL courses.
The content for the courses in ASL is broken into introduction, sign production, extended comprehension, interaction, and breakaways, which include team-building, facial expression, visualization, command, and finger spelling.
Also, it includes cumulative reviews in which students learn how to make appropriate introductions, how to get someone’s attention and how to negotiate the environment of signed conversations. Exposure to the Deaf Community improves abilities as mentioned earlier.