American Sign Language Certificate of Achievement

This course will cover a general introduction to American Sign Language, its structure, grammatical rules and vocabulary. These areas include topics such as the manual alphabet, basic words, sentences, numbers, phonology, morphology, the use of the space, classifier verbs, adjectives, nouns, pronouns, non-manual, cues and finger spelling. It will also cover issues related to deaf culture and history. There will be assignments outside of the classroom. This course is taught primarily in American Sign Language.

This course is a continuation of American Sign Language I designed to improve expressive and receptive skills and to expand on vocabulary and grammatical rules. Students will focus on non-manual markers and facial grammar. There will be assignments outside the classroom. This class is taught primarily in American Sign Language.

This course enables students to understand complex language functions while developing skills through interactive activities and storytelling. Students will gain further command of ASL advanced grammar, syntax and non-manual behavior.

Examines the unique culture and history of the Deaf community in the U.S. Discussions include the values, norms, identities, traditions and subcultures within the larger Deaf community. The nature of sign language, the education and employment of Deaf individuals and historical treatment of deafness will be explored.

The course introduces and explores the areas of language acquisition, dialects, social variations of language, language and ethnicity, language and gender and cross-cultural and multi-cultural perspectives of language. The student will get a broad understanding of phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics in the context of English and its history.

This course provides a general orientation to and overview of the communication between cultures. The emphasis will be upon offering insight into how cultural differences and similarities impact upon the relationship between culture and communication. The focus will deal with the challenges of communication in a culturally diverse society and offer techniques for improving communication between members of different cultures.