Strategies: examining their ASL video log or journal to determine preferred conversational forms and discussing next steps with their teacher to refine their syntax; restating a conversation in their choice of words in recorded form; creating a video or a poster featuring images of themselves in an ASL conversation, pictures of the items they are discussing, and pictures of the ASL words for those items; conversing about real-life experiences they have had within the ASL community, such as meeting an ASL person at an ASL cultural event

• How did your review of ASL sentence structure prior to examining the ASL video text help you understand the content, even though the topic of the discourse was unfamiliar?
• How did practising turn-taking with a peer help you in your role as host for a panel discussion with ASL guests?
• How can recording and then reviewing your work help you identify areas for improvement?

• Teachers can encourage students to:
  • use repetition to improve their constructing skills for effective conversational discourse. Ask students to repeat their constructions several times, and encourage them to ask their peers to observe and provide feedback on their work;
  • select ideas from their peers’ feedback related to the use of real-world indexing and apply them in a discussion (e.g., IX=2  NEED  DOCTOR.).
• Teachers can also provide students with information on:
  • specific individuals in the ASL community who are interested in helping students practise their conversational skills;
  • where materials and/or resources can be found to support their efforts to improve their ASL conversations.

Skills: subject-verb agreement; topicalization; incorporation of non-manual markers in yes/no questions; understanding ASL cultural cues such as eye contact that signifies turn-taking

• How do you use ASL inflection to denote colour, size, or shape?
• You have improved your ASL vocabulary so that you are now able to describe the technology you use at school or home. What skills are needed to engage in a conversation about how that technology is used?
• What cultural protocols should you follow when you interrupt and resume conversations with a guest in your classroom?

Teachers can:

• encourage students to use self-reflection to identify skills they used to acquire and respond to ideas and information in ASL;
• use ASL diagnostic assessments to ascertain students’ skill levels in comprehending classifier construction in conversations;
• ask students to work in pairs to create a simple scene, using visual aids as a tool to establish reference points for a person and an object. Then, the students can remove the visual aids, but use these reference points and ASL grammatical structures to create a video text that incorporates eye gaze and referential shifting to indicate a non-present object and person;
• provide students with a list of ASL organizations where they can find additional resources to further develop topicalization skills in ASL conversation.