Enrollments have soared in American Sign Language classes at colleges around the United States, but many of the students are not planning to become sign language interpreters or teachers for the deaf. Instead, they are looking for a way to avoid taking Spanish, French, or another spoken language.
“I thought, ‘Cool you can talk with your hands’,” said Marisol ARZATE, a student a Pierce College in Los Angeles. When she registered at Pierce for her first semester of American Sign Language, ARZATE said, her hunch was: “This should be easy. No big deal.”
These days ARZATE warns that ASL is tough to master, and so do many others with normal hearing who have studied the language. Still; it is attracting many students who prefer to learn visually and who attend, or plan to enrol at, schools that approve ASL for meeting language requirements.
So many students have discovered ASL in recent years that it recorded the fastest enrolment growth rate of any so-called foreign language offered on US college campuses, according to the Modern Language Association. The group says ASL is now the fifth most widely studied foreign language in college, trailing Spanish, French, German, and Italian.
Academic leaders are divided on the educational merits. Although the list of colleges approving ASL for foreign-language entrance or graduation requirements keep growing, some prominent schools, including the University of Southern California, are holdouts. They say ASL –unlike French, for example- does not open a window into another country’s culture.
The debate has not dampened students’ enthusiasm.
The origins of ASL are traced at least to the late 1600s, when a form of sign language was used by the deaf community on Martha’s Vineyard.
The language moved closer to its current form in the early 1800s when a Protestant minister –Thomas Hopkins GALLAUDET, for whom Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., is named- established a Connecticut school for the deaf.
Today, it is estimated that ASL is the primary language for as many as 500,000 people.
Academics have widely recognised ASL as a full-fledged language with complex grammar. It relies on arm and hand movements as well as body posture and facial expressions. Although deaf people sometimes sprinkle English into conversations by finger-spelling words, ASL has a distinct vocabulary. One dictionary lists more than 7000 entries.
Linguists overwhelmingly dismiss the notion that ASL is easy to learn, although it lacks a written literature and comes more quickly to some students than spoken languages.
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