Discipline American Sign Language: Fill & Download for Free

What a great question to ask your instructor if this is a homework assignment.We are assuming that you mean American Sign Language by “ASL”.And different disciplines use the term “review paper” in different ways, so I won’t guess what it means in your situation.What sources have you found that makes ASL a good topic for a review paper?

Edit: Ian McCullough gave me the good idea in his comment to this question to include links to programs teaching skills to middle/late teens which users have found to be advantageous, useful, and well-run. I will therefore be updating this answer periodically without further notice, and provide additional links as a resource for parents and teens. Please feel free to comment and provide more links to places you have personal experience with, and like. Please also disclose any affiliations or bias...Orienteering -- there is almost nothing in life that teaches lifesaving skills and self esteem better than being able to set your compass and guide yourself to a destination. Here's information about:Outward Bound (thanks Ian!) http://www.outwardbound.org/YMCA Camp (thanks, Ian!) http://www.ymca.net/camp/Los Angeles Orienteering Club: http://losangelesorienteering.org/drupal/faq-page/Sailing -- being captain of your own ship and being 'the one' to tell which way the wind blows is a good metaphor for life.Team Sports -- contributing as a member of a team doing anything -- bowling, baseball, tug of war -- you name it -- teaches cooperative skills that demonstrate how we best work together. Talking about the contributions of various members of the team gives the best lesson in self-discovery. 'What do I contribute?' and 'How do I best contribute?' and 'What do I bring to the team?' are examples of the kinds of questions which arise naturally whenever team sports are played long enough to develop team spirit.Individual Sports and Other Activities Requiring Responsible Improvement -- doing something for which one is primarily responsible creates a kind of focus and search for excellence which cannot be obtained in other ways.Touch Typing and Speed Reading -- these two skills, together, provide advantages and not having them creates disadvantages. If you can express your thoughts with more fluency and speed, and if you can obtain comprehension faster than you otherwise would, you end up saving time in life.First Aid and Disaster Emergency Training -- these skills also create all kinds of competencies and self-reliance; when teens know what first aid to give in emergencies, and what to do when, it creates value to the community too. Some may be too young to take a class without adult accompaniment. I suggest if that is the case, that a parent or caregiver accompany the teen. The training is useful and a prerequisite for many things, including being a camp counselor.Red Cross http://www.redcross.org/take-a-class andCERT http://www.citizencorps.gov/cert/)Meditation -- those who have gotten comfortable with a regular practice of deep meditation (and yoga!) when young develop an equanimity that carries through every situation in life in which they find themselves. Discipline is important. Daily self discipline through meditation is a priceless gift.Sign Language -- American Sign Language (ASL) and Sign in other countries (each has its own Sign language) are extraordinary useful for times when silence is necessary or when it is impossible to speak, or when communicating with someone who Signs due to deafness or having a hearing or auditory processing disability. One example of when it is impossible to speak is when someone is intubated in hospital, when life is nearing its end and speaking is impossible; or when it is dangerous to talk out loud (in times of war, for example).Here is an online ASL course: https://signingonline.com/Community colleges frequently teach ASL courses tooEdited to addCooking -- learning to budget for food, to cook nutritious food, to shop, prepare, serve and clean up in a household is a very important skill to have. Fast food, take out, and frozen/canned food doesn't compare nutritionally. Cooking is also great for entertaining, and over time I have seen many friendships augmented and cemented over dinners at home.

Do people in the Deaf community prefer the term “hard of hearing” to refer to people who have some hearing, as opposed to calling them Deaf?The best way to examine this is to acknowledge that labels have always been in flux, both within the community itself, and from without, by hearing people with varying levels of attachment to the community.When Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet[1] went to England and then France in 1814, in search of someone who would teach him any sign language in order to communicate with his neighbor’s daughter, Alice Cogswell,[2] he met Laurent Clerc,[3]a highly educated man who was a graduate of the Institution Nationale des Sourds-Muets à Paris, so named in 1791. In English: National Institution for the Deaf and Dumb in Paris. It is known today as Institut National de Jeunes Sourds de Paris, National Institute for the Deaf Children of Paris.This was the terminology that carried the day, as plainly seen by the establishment of the first permanent school for the Deaf, in 1817, by Clerc and Gallaudet. It was originally established as the Connecticut Asylum for the Education of Deaf and Dumb Persons.[4] A short time thereafter, it became known as the American School for the Deaf.Let’s fast forward a little to the establishment of what is now Gallaudet University,[5] in Washington DC. It was and is the world’s only liberal arts college and later university for the Deaf. In 1864, it was named the National Deaf-Mute College. In 1894, it was named Gallaudet College in honor of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, and the college’s ASL name at this point became Gallaudet’s own sign name that he had used when alive. In 1986, it became Gallaudet University.There is a certain irony in the fact that the infamous Milan conference[6]in 1880 saw fit to refer to Deaf people as Deaf people, given it represents a truly painful event in Deaf culture and education with repercussions that linger even now, and will continue to pollute the future. Known as the Second International Congress on Education of the Deaf, this all hearing (save one lone Deaf delegate) conference decided that manual education,[7] as widely practiced in America, the UK, France, and elsewhere, utilizing the local Sign Language, should be completely abandoned and banned, in favor of a completely oral[8] approach to Deaf education, without regard to this approach’s appropriateness, utility, or chances of success in life and in language acquisition.Also happening in 1880 was the establishment of the National Association of the Deaf,[9] which has been a champion of the American Deaf community from the beginning, and certainly they’ve always self identified as Deaf. George Veditz[10] was an early president of the association, and was one of the first people to emphasize the preservation and documentation of ASL. His 1913 film, Preservation of the Sign Language, is a 14 minute thing of beauty, and in it he uses careful formal ASL for clarity and readability. He emphatically refers to himself and the community as Deaf. It is now permanently hosted by the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry,[11] emphasizing its importance to Deaf history and history as a whole.Fast forward a little to after World War Two. While crude hearing tests were developed as early as 1879 and audiometers were developed in the 1920s, none were commercially produced until 1928.[12] Audiology itself as a modern discipline, as in the direct fitting of people with hearing aids, did not begin until 1946, when large numbers of WWII veterans with battle damaged hearing returned home. [13] It was roughly around this time that the concept of “hard of hearing” originated.This represents the point at which, really, Deaf people began to be evaluated, sorted, and labeled into categories of “hearing impairment”. Before this time, generally, if you were Deaf, you were Deaf. No one really cared how much anyone heard, what kind of deafness it was, and whether it was augmentable. If you were born Deaf, you were Deaf. Your schooling probably was highly suboptimal, unless you were lucky enough to attend a manual school, and/or went to Gallaudet. But the language thrived, and the Deaf culture carried on.In the 1960s, a hearing man working at Gallaudet, William Stokoe, proved that American Sign Language was in fact a language, using a grant from the National Science Foundation.[14] Imagine having to prove your own language is real.Before this time, all manual languages were seen as nothing more than pantomime. And yet. The 1970s were a fertile period in Deaf education for the invention of Manually Coded English[15] systems, of which no doubt Signed Exact English[16] is by far the best known. SEE sought to represent signs presented in English word order, with all prefixes and suffixes signed separately.This is where I come in to this story. I was diagnosed at two with “severe to profound bilateral sensorineural hearing loss” and placed in a hearing impaired self contained classroom program at the local school. Throughout my entire time at that school district, I was never identified as anything but hearing impaired.In 1980, my school district received its first soundproof booth and monofonator for the use of its “hearing impaired” program. My hearing was never good enough from the very beginning to hear human speech with or without augmentation, but nevertheless I was fitted with hearing aids that I was to wear outside the school and a FM unit in the classroom, and taught speech without regard for the fact I had no language.[17] It amuses me, by the way, that the newspaper article cited claims that my teachers taught sign language. The teachers used, at best, a few SEE signs while speaking verbally. It’s a recognized method called SimCom[18] and resulted in grievous gaps in understanding and language on the part of Deaf children who only had these few signs to go on as the entirety of their communication.How did all this emphasis on oralism, augmentation, mainstreaming, and the systematic lack of ASL affect Deaf self awareness?In 1988, two Deaf researchers, Carol Padden and Tom Humphries, in Deaf in America,[19] said:We use the lowercase deaf when referring to the audiological condition of not hearing, and the uppercase Deaf when referring to a particular group of deaf people who share a language – American Sign Language (ASL) – and a culture. The members of this group have inherited their sign language, use it as a primary means of communication among themselves, and hold a set of beliefs about themselves and their connection to the larger society. We distinguish them from, for example, those who find themselves losing their hearing because of illness, trauma or age; although these people share the condition of not hearing, they do not have access to the knowledge, beliefs, and practices that make up the culture of Deaf people.When I came to Gallaudet in 1995, I was not too popular for objecting to the idea that Deaf people were subdivided. I pointedly labeled myself small d Deaf, not because I was merely physically Deaf, an impossibility given my fluent ASL, my diploma from a Deaf high school, and certainly my attendance at Gallaudet itself. I did that because I wished to make the point that so many Deaf people by that time were denied language, culture, ASL, and certainly any knowledge that a Deaf community itself existed at all. I myself only learned that Gallaudet itself and ASL and a Deaf community existed at all in 1988, with the confluences of Gallaudet’s Deaf President Now[20] protest and my coming across my mama’s copy of The Joy of Signing.[21]I told people on campus about my childhood classmate James, who was crying one day in school because he was scared that he would die soon. Why? Because he had never met a Deaf adult and made the leap that this by definition meant that Deaf children didn’t grow up to become Deaf adults. James, despite longing for a Deaf community, was at that time labeled by others as a small d Deaf person who had rudimentary English and a few signs. He hadn’t made this choice for himself, and I had problems with this.This problem exploded anew in 2006, with Jane Fernandes,[22] a born Deaf person who had Deaf parents, but they had decided for her that she would be raised Oral, and had learned ASL as an adult, when she was appointed to replace the outgoing late deafened president, I. King Jordan. Protests roiled and she was removed because she was “not Deaf enough”. I was myself invited to a Gallaudet conference[23] in February 2007, where I discussed the ongoing problem of the stratification of Deaf identity in the Deaf world, especially the divisive and exclusionary problem of defining who was Deaf enough to be considered Deaf.Where are we in 2017? Inclusive. A lot more inclusive. At this point in time, small d deaf and big d Deaf are largely gone as divisive appellations. I am, obviously, now willing to proudly identify myself as Deaf. As a community, I think that we have learned some lessons from 2006, and the growing reluctance to accept the term hard of hearing is part of this. In practice, I accept whatever a Deaf person labels themselves, while reminding them that they are affirmatively a part of the Deaf world and can participate in it to any extent appropriate for them. I don’t do this to be an evangelist, I do this because the last 70 years of medicalization, augmentation, and stratification have left a mark on all of us.I hope you’re still with me. I have been privileged in this answer to tell what I often describe to hearing people as “the Deaf Christmas story”. Every year since I started at my Deaf school, I have attended Clerc-Gallaudet Week[24] events. Many years, I have recited it to Deaf children gathered together. Observed annually in December, it is a time for sharing the empowering stories of how Deaf education, language, culture, and identity formed. I enjoyed very much this opportunity to tell a version of it here this year. Thank you.Footnotes[1] Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet - Wikipedia[2] Alice Cogswell - Wikipedia[3] Laurent Clerc - Wikipedia[4] American School for the Deaf - Wikipedia[5] Gallaudet University - Wikipedia[6] Second International Congress on Education of the Deaf - Wikipedia[7] Manualism - Wikipedia[8] Oralism - Wikipedia[9] National Association of the Deaf (United States) - Wikipedia[10] George Veditz - Wikipedia[11] National Film Registry - Wikipedia[12] Audiometry - Wikipedia[13] Audiology - Wikipedia[14] American Sign Language Spoken Here[15] Manually coded English - Wikipedia[16] Signing Exact English - Wikipedia[17] Herald and Review from Decatur, Illinois on October 9, 1980 · Page 4[18] Simultaneous communication - Wikipedia[19] Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture: Carol A. Padden, Tom L. Humphries: 9780674194243: Amazon.com: Books[20] Deaf President Now - Wikipedia[21] http://The Joy of Signing https://www.amazon.com/dp/0685182452/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_2wFiAb3E58EYE[22] Jane Fernandes - Wikipedia[23] First-Ever Deaf B/Vlogging Conference[24] Celebrate Deaf History with Clerc-Gallaudet Week, December 3-9