Why We Teach American Sign Language: Part One

Tuesday, June 29th, 2010

How many 11-year-olds have the concentration, attention, and energy to learn another language, a language with no familiar sounds, words, or sentence structures?

Every Wednesday afternoon, our special needs students can be found intently focused on learning to communicate without a single spoken word, with American Sign Language lessons taught by Debbie Lawrence, a certified Sign2Me instructor and veteran of 33 years of ASL teaching.

Lawrence is cheerful, energetic, and passionate about inspiring her students not only to learn to speak fluent ASL, but to use it as a channel to improve their social skills and sense of accomplishment. “What’s your happy?” she asks regularly, hoping her students will leave class exhilarated and satisfied as they practice their gestures together. On any given day, she might be explaining ASL grammar, leading the class in signed renditions of their favorite songs or working one-on-one with a student to help them grasp a sign.

ASL is the third most commonly spoken language in the US, after English and Spanish, and is especially valuable for special needs students with cognitive or language processing difficulties. Because it’s a visual language, it demands precision in gestures and motions, which means that a student struggling with kinesthesia – the sense of where his or her body is at any given moment – will have the chance to build those neural pathways every lesson. There are four components to any ASL sign:

1) Hand shape
2) Palm orientation
3)Location of gesture
4) Movement of gesture

All these components must be controlled together, since the same hand shape can mean many things when combined with different other elements. “I have found that the kinesthetic and tactile practice of the language is developing my students’ motor skills,” says Lawrence. Not only that, but the motor control required to make gestures consistently has helped students learn to focus. “[When I began to teach them, the kids] were all over the place,” she says. “‘It was like a game of musical chairs.’ Now they come in wanting to learn and excited to show off what they’ve learned. They’re so motivated to learn another language.”

Spatial visualization is also inherent in ASL communication. For example, to express “continent”, one might gesture in the shape of the continent, and to indicate a specific country, one might draw the continent, then indicate where on the continent it was located. Similarly, to show a bird in a tree, one might sign the tree shape, then point within the shape to the location of the bird – the person learning about the bird location wouldn’t have to look through all the branches, but would know at once where it was.

One of Debbie Lawrence’s most common techniques to teach spatial awareness with ASL is through signing nursery rhymes, something she describes as being “very much like drama contained in a stationary space.” A nursery rhyme as simple and charming as Little Miss Muffett, when signed, involves a spider descending gesture next to where the Little Miss Muffett gesture previously happened, to show where the two were and how close they sat. When Little Miss Muffett is shown frightened away, it is accompanied by an expression of terror and a rapid “running” gesture – that shows by its direction of motion which way she ran and how fast.

As a result of the intimate connection between ASL, focus, and motor control, learning to sign every week has been helping our students grow mentally and physically, as well as giving them a widely useful language to speak!

Join us again next week when we talk about how Debbie Lawrence and ASL came to The Whole Learning School, and what it’s meant for our students’ social skills and self-esteem.

Go on to Part 2 or Part 3.

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