Sometimes when I see ASL on the screen, I still end up reading the captions. Why is that? This workshop will take an opportunity to unbox ASL from a linguistic perspective on why somethings may be unclear on screen. How can we improve it through teaching ASL?
The workshop will cover different topics. For example, when watching a signer signed “Potato, vegetable” then read the caption to figure what it was. “A potato is a vegetable.” How do we sign that?
Another example is the sign “look”. Does it mean just “to look”? Actually, it does have another meaning.
Another to topic to unbox is sentence word order. We have seen that question trending on what ASL grammar is like. Often it is said it is OSV or topic comment. What does this mean? Is this the main ASL grammar?
There are some gray areas in ASL grammar. Some teachers are unsure how to include them or avoid them entirely. This influences signing on the screen to be unclear due to lack of these grammar areas. What should we do with these gray areas?
Also, we will cover different topics from a linguistic perspective on how to improve signing performance on screen to be clearer so relying on captions isn’t needed. Anyone, even majors in ASL teaching, interpreting, performance, or those who are interested in learning ASL, are all welcome to this workshop.