American Sign Language resource site - Lifeprint.com
Lessons:
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A mother (christy1246@______) writes:
Dr. Vicars,
I have a perfectly healthy 2 year old that refuses to talk. We have a vocabulary of 124 signs most of what are on the 100 signs page. We constantly go through the "What's The Sign For ..." and pull up the bookmark of your web page. If you actually have time to read this email can you answer a question...We need a bigger list of signs, would you recommend me going through the lessons or are you working on a more signs page of maybe 100 to 200 of the most commonly used signs? ...
-- Christy
Christy,
Interesting that you would ask.
The main series of lessons in the ASL
University Curriculum are based on research I did into what are the most
common concepts used in everyday communication. I compiled lists of
concepts from concordance research that was based on a language database
(corpus) of
hundreds of thousands of language samples. Then I took the concepts
that appeared the most
frequently and translated those concepts into their equivalent ASL counterparts and
included them in the lessons moving from most
frequently used to less frequently used.
Thus, going through the lessons sequentially starting with lesson 1 allows
you to reach communicative competence very quickly--and it is based on
second language acquisition research (mixed with a couple decades of real
world teaching experience).
Cordially,
Dr. Bill
p.s. Another very real and important part of the Lifeprint ASL curriculum project is that of being able to use the "magic" of the internet to provide a high quality curriculum to those who need it the most but are usually least able to afford it.
(That picture sums up my philosophy regarding curriculum.
Students shouldn't
have to pay outrageous amounts of money just to learn sign language.
-Dr. Bill)
