Week Two Discussion One

The sources provided unfortunately don’t have much in the way of resources for ASL except for a ton of songs interpreted into ASL (by what appears to be a hearing teacher or interpreter), which though useful for a few things in the upper level ASL classes, isn’t much use to me in my lower level classes. However “regular” YouTube has a plethora of useful videos by Deaf people that work great with the content I teach in my ASL classes. The video I chose is by Rob Nielson, a popular Deaf teacher, where he has written an example of an ABC Story in ASL. There are six types of stories in ASL and one of them is known as an ‘ABC Story’, where an entire short story is told using handshapes that are formed with the letters of the alphabet in order from A to Z (and sometimes backward too). Because it is one of the most popular types of stories and the easiest to create yourself, I have my students create their own. Therefore, I not only model one for them ‘live’ that I wrote, I also show them a handful of others by Deaf authors and instructors. This is one of my favorites because of the Non-Manual Signals (facial expressions and body languages) that he uses – something beginning signers struggle with. They don’t realize how much they use them when they talk and so, when they sign, they think so hard about doing them that they forget to let it naturally happen. So, this video is good for showing that naturally happening as the ABC Story is told. This story is about chess and I encourage you to watch it, even if you don’t know ASL, because I bet you will understand most of it. THAT’S how expressive it is and that is why it is such a good resource for teaching this concept in ASL.