Purposes: a digital flyer to promote ASL video works or products; an announcement for an ASL literary night; a poster using the ASL number system for money to market an upcoming fundraising event

Characteristics: rhyming or non-rhyming patterns; imagery and ASL words that convey emotion; distinctive use of handshapes to indicate colours and symbols

• What key ASL words and cultural references help you identify the purpose of an ASL flyer? Explain how this ASL form might potentially attract people to an ASL event.
• What are key ASL words to use when introducing a guest speaker? How is this different from introducing a friend?
• What ASL grammar structures and key ASL words can you identify in a congratulatory ASL letter to a business owned by an ASL person?

The teacher can:

• ask students to identify storytelling characteristics that convey information about ASL culture;
• invite a person from an ASL advocacy group to give a presentation on marketing or advocacy strategies, and then ask students to create an advertisement to promote an event.

ASL stylistic devices: embedding temporal aspects in the action of ASL verbs; indicating the sequence in a story or in instructions

• What ASL handshapes are repeated in the ASL poem “Rabbit”? Why do you think the poet used various ASL handshapes in their poem?
• How did the media techniques and shifting perspective help you determine the meaning of Ian Sanborn’s ASL literary work “The Trout”?

• Teachers can encourage students to examine an ASL literary work such as “The Caterpillar”, and discuss how ASL adverbs are used as a stylistic device.

ASL grammatical structures and conventions: parameters; inflections; nouns; pronouns; verbs; adjectives; adverbs; classifier constructions; relative clauses; negations; question forms; syntax; non-manual markers

• What happens when a specific parameter of an ASL word is changed?
• What non-manual grammatical markers can be used to indicate a wh-q for WHO?
• What ASL classifiers could be used to make a short story more comical?

Teachers can:

• introduce ASL grammatical structures used in ASL map orientation to encourage students to identify a few locations, such as one city’s relation to another city;
• demonstrate how unconventional ASL grammatical structures may be used for specific purposes in ASL stories, such as handshape to denote “tail” in the ASL poem “Cow and Rooster”;
• encourage students, with teacher support, to decipher-deconstruct the use of possessive pronouns in a short presentation.

Perspectives: ASL and non-ASL people

Values: absence of ASL people hired to advise, coach, and act in television and other media productions; the ongoing struggle to ensure that ASL is used in formal education systems

Biases: stereotypes in cartoons of ASL interpreters and their use of language

• Identify terms that demonstrate whether a non-ASL theatre critic has accurate knowledge of ASL theatre. How might members of the ASL community react to the critic’s review?
• How did you determine the main character’s cultural values in the ASL story “David’s Snowman”? How is the character’s cultural identity made evident?
• Can you list some words used in social media that indicate a bias against members of the ASL community, and suggest alternatives that would be more respectful?

Teachers can encourage students to:

• identify perspectives and/or biases in ASL literary works and discuss their findings;
• search online to explore how ASL people across Canada are portrayed in different texts, and consider the impact these texts have on ASL communities.