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"American Sign Language University" at Lifeprint.com is a site for ASL
students and teachers.
Here you will find information and resources to help you improve your signing.
ASL Lessons: |1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10|11|12|13|14|15|16|17|18|19|20|21|22|23|24|25|26|27|28|29|30|
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► First
100 Signs
► Jokes |
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About ASLU
► Fingerspelling
introduction |
Hi! Welcome to Lifeprint (LP). I'm Bill Vicars. Nice to meet you. |
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► Accreditation
► Resources
► Registration (You do NOT need to register)
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From the studio: Dr. Bill teaching one-on-one:
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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,
Hello :)
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 sign language curriculum to those who need it the most but are often least able to afford it.
(That cartoon sums up my philosophy regarding curriculum. Students shouldn't have to pay outrageous amounts of money just to learn sign language. -Dr. Bill)
