COURSE NAME: Sign Language

SCHOOL DISTRICT: Malone (Franklin Academy)

INSTRUCTOR: Tracy Scharf

HALF YEAR

COURSE PREREQUISITES: none

BRIEF COURSE DESCRIPTION / OUTLINE: This course will help the student develop an understanding of
basic sign language. Sign Language is a complex visual-spatial language that is used by the Deaf
community in the United States and English-speaking parts of Canada. It is a linguistically complete,
natural language. It is the native language of many Deaf men and women, as well as some hearing
children born into Deaf families.

Sign Language has a very complex grammar. Unlike spoken languages where there is just one serial stream of phonemes, sign languages can have multiple things going on at the same time. This multiple segmentation makes it an exciting language for linguists to study and a frustrating language for Deaf-impaired
(aka, hearing) people to learn. Sign Language has its own morphology (rules for the creation of words),
phonetics (rules for handshapes), and grammar that are very unlike those found in spoken languages.
Sign languages promise to be a rich source of analysis for future linguists to come.

OTHER NOTES / MISCELLANEOUS: Sign Languages arethe fourth most commonly used language in the U.S.A.

1/14/04