Pershing High School – American Sign Language II

Mar 2026 · 2nd Semester

Since ASL is a visual language, the main focus of this course is to continue to develop the learners’ interpretive receptive and presentational expressive skills. When viewing signs and gestures in ASL, students learn to recognize the ones related to themselves, home, family, friends, neighborhood, school, community, professions and environment. They also develop their presentational expressive mode, as they learn to communicate visually some basic information about well-practiced, familiar topics related to their everyday life. They recombine and reformulate memorized language in the present and in the future, and report series of isolated events in the past. 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 unacceptable practices.