Hello to everyone reading this! I am excited to begin documenting and sharing my progress as a self-directed language learner focusing on American Sign Language (ASL). I am a beginner in ASL, I was initially curious to take up the language for two important reasons. The first being that I found the concept of a language where sounds were replaced for signs and supplemented by facial expressions fascinating. This is what makes ASL both unique and challenging as compared to other spoken languages. The second reason why I wanted to take ASL was because I was interested in further exploring the language department here at the University of Richmond. My goal for the semester is to develop a basic level of proficiency in ASL and lay the foundations to which I can keep adding.
Our language learning group currently consists of five people. I am taking the class with my friend Susmita who is also a beginner in ASL. The other student is Eli who has taken this course last year and is at an intermediate level of proficiency. Our main instructor and language partner is Ms. Reba who is Deaf. She comes from three generations of Deaf households and has many years of experience in teaching ASL to the deaf community here in Richmond, Virginia. Finally, we have Ms. Kaye who is a “hearing person” proficient in both English and ASL. She acts as Ms. Reba’s translator and bridges the communication barrier that currently exists between us and Ms. Reba.
This has been a challenging semester thus far in many ways. Due to the restrictions posed by COVID-19, this class had to adapted to a virtual environment using Zoom. We initially struggled with setting up the technology and having it run smoothly on a consistent basis. Ms. Reba often had technical difficulties on her end in getting the system to work. As an older lady who is much more accustomed to teaching in person, I imagine this must not have been easy for her. Additionally, we would also have network issues where her video would sometimes lag or cut out. As ASL is an extremely visual language, these obstacles initially felt very frustrating to deal with. However, after a few weeks of delays, we were finally underway in the first week of February!
We began with the building blocks of ASL—fingerspelling. I recall that when I had previously studied alphabets from other languages, I would practice writing them down in my notebook however, with ASL the experience was completely different as I had to move and stretch my fingers to imitate the different English alphabets instead. Some letters like a “C” or an “O” are fairly straightforward as they are fingerspelled the way they look whereas other letters have very unique finger positions that in no way reflect what the letter looks like in the English alphabet. It took me a lot of practice to learn all 26 alphabets and even more so to be able to recognize and interpret them within conversation. Next, we moved on to numbers and counting. We initially learned how to count from one to ten and then learned that eleven to twenty is simply that with just the slightest bit of tweaks. This made me realize that the differences between ASL words can be very subtle and thus, slightly altering your hand positions or having inappropriate facial expressions can lead to a breakdown in communication. One of the things that Ms. Reba stressed was the importance of having correct facial expressions to accompany your message. For example, if you are signing that you are sleepy, you must make the sign for sleepy and also visually demonstrate how you feel by having a tired expression on your face. As someone who usually appears calm and composed externally, allowing myself permission to be expressive and vulnerable would take some getting used to.
Once some of these introductory ideas and topics were discussed, we delved into our supplementary textbook, Barron’s American Sign Language. I was pleasantly surprised by how well the book is written and organized. It covers many different topics broken up into chapters and sub-chapters with directions and arrows for how to do specific signs. The next step is to expand my ASL vocabulary and start practicing signing on my own or with a partner by following the textbook. Overall, I am glad that I decided to take this class and I am excited to share what I learn and document my experiences throughout the semester.
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