American Sign Language 4 Course

The main goal of the course is for students to be able to expand their advanced expressive and receptive skills with the goal of building fluency and mastering role shifting; to master the skills of using spatial and descriptive classifiers; and to expand utilization of the element and descriptive classifiers by discussing illness, describing family heritage, and cooking. The main grammar focus of the course will be knowing the differences in classifier systems, using proper grammar for directional verbs, distinguishing between agreement and plain (uninflected) verbs, discriminating between descriptive and instrument classifiers, and demonstrating cooking skills.

The central themes of the course are discussing foods, illness, people’s behaviors, house floor-plan/layout, time sequences, countries, migrations, objects, products, animals’ behaviors, and cooking skills. The student learning outcomes of this level are to be able to locate and identify objects by describing sizes, shapes, and textures; express illness medically; make suggestions; discuss life events, family history, and reasons for migrating; and demonstrate how to cook or bake foods with the objects in ASL.