Baltimore School for the Arts – American Sign Language I

Mar 2026 · 2nd Semester

Since ASL is a visual language, the main focus of this introductory course is to develop the learners’ interpretive receptive and presentational expressive skills. When viewing signs and gestures in ASL, learners learn to recognize language related to themselves, home, family, friends, neighborhood, school, community, professions and environment. They also develop their presentational expressive mode, as they learn to visually communicate some basic information about well-practiced, familiar topics. ASL novice learners may be understood with difficulty by sympathetic ASL users who are very accustomed to interacting with language learners. Interpretive reading (finger spelling) and presentational glossing (writing) are introduced, but is not the main focus of this course. Learners show awareness of the most obvious acceptable practices.