Purposes and audiences: to provide background information about a well-known ASL actor to a theatre audience; to invite classmates to an online ASL cultural event; to inform the school community about an issue of importance to the ASL community; to thank a guest speaker at an event; to inform parent council about the highlights of a sporting event

• If the purpose of your ASL announcement is to provide information about a field trip to younger students, what details need to be included in it?
• What type of ASL text could you create to inform the school community about a bake-sale fundraising campaign? Who is your audience?

• Teachers can encourage students to: compare an ASL literary work and an ASL text, such as a children’s poem and a video of a safety procedure; determine each work’s purpose and audience; and then identify some of the characteristics of each work.
• Teachers may also organize students into small groups to discuss specific ASL literary works and ASL texts, and then ask them to identify the purpose of each ASL work and its form.

Forms and purposes: instructions to conduct a basic experiment; an advertising campaign to increase awareness and understanding of Indigenous Sign Language people; a basic ASL presentation that celebrates the diversity of the 2SLGBTQIA+ ASL community; a video with explanatory text and images to recognize the past and present contributions of Black ASL Ontarians

• What form would be best for engaging your audience’s interest in an event, such as a celebration of the International Day of Sign Languages, hosted by an ASL community organization?
• What particular media techniques or images could help you to choose an appropriate form of ASL text, given your purpose?

Teachers can support students by:

• modelling how to use an ASL journal entry so that students can recount their experience of a visit (in person or virtual) to a significant historical site, such as the tombstone of Samuel Greene in Belleville, Ontario;
• encouraging them to use a few different ASL forms, such as giving brief instructions, providing simple directions, or conducting a short interview.

ASL grammatical structures and conventions: use ASL adjectives when describing an ASL sporting event to their peers, including the venue, players, and attendees; use ASL pronouns when asking questions of their teacher; use ASL inflection with non-manual modifiers for BLUE: IX=1  WANT  LIGHT>BLUE. IX=3  WANT  DARK>BLUE

• If you wanted to make a statement, such as IX=1  WANT  MILK., a question, how would you change the construction?
• How can you use non-manual markers to indicate negation in an ASL sentence such as  IX=3  DISLIKE  PARTY?
• How can you use ASL depicting verbs to enhance your public service announcement to students about bicycle safety?

Teachers can ask students to:

• create a short ASL story about birds that come to help a character in a story, using ASL ordinal numbers (e.g., FIRST  BIRD  BLUE, SECOND  BIRD  RED, THIRD  BIRD  YELLOW);
• select ASL non-manual grammatical markers for wh-questions (e.g., INDIGENOUS  PEOPLE  GATHERING, WHEN?) when conducting a short interview;
• create simple scenes involving one or two characters using ASL syntax;
• use pictures posted in the classroom, such as two pictures of cats, as props, and create ASL sentences that incorporate eye gaze and referential shifts to establish references to cats that are not present.

Strategies: create a list of ASL words encountered in online ASL literary works, and identify the context in which the words are used; consult a classroom ASL word wall to find synonyms; consult a glossary for ASL lexicalized word meanings; create and maintain a shared digital file containing a list of new classifiers learned in class

• How can knowing one ASL word help you to figure out the meaning of another? For example, how can knowing the noun form of the ASL word PAINT help you to figure out the meaning of other ASL words related to PAINT?
• How many ASL words can you think of that use the C handshape such as the ASL word LOOK?

Teachers can:

• ask students to use the context of a new ASL word to infer its meaning, and then include the new word in an ASL work they are constructing;
• construct a cloze procedure using a short ASL work and ask the class for classifiers to “fill in the blanks”;
• encourage students to use ASL language resources to increase their repertoire of synonyms;
• ask students to choose an area of interest, such as social media, and acquire technical language related to that area;
• model how to research new ASL words, and then encourage students to explore the etymology of ASL words to expand their understanding of groups of related ASL words.