Unlocking English Through ASL Depictions

PRESENTER

Alisha Bronk

Alisha Bronk, a Deaf Interpreter with over 30 years of experience, is dedicated to advancing the fields of American Sign Language and International Sign. She obtained her master’s degree in applied Linguistics from Portland State University in 2009. Currently, she is a full-time faculty member in the ASL and Interpreting Education Department at the Rochester Institute of Technology’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf (RIT/NTID), where she also holds the position of coordinator for the Certification in Deaf Interpreting (CIDI) hybrid courses.

As a dynamic and enthusiastic educator, Alisha is committed to enhancing her students’ understanding through visual and spatial representation. She frequently conducts workshops aimed at improving sign language skills in innovative 5D formats. Outside of her professional pursuits, Alisha enjoys hiking and traveling, and she values spending quality time with her family to create lasting memories.

TRANSCRIPT

Molly:

Hello everyone. Thank you for joining our session today for our ReAction conference. My name is Molly, I am part of the GoReact team. I work as a client success manager. Today we are going to be talking about unlocking English through a SL depiction. If you have any questions at the bottom of the screen, you’ll see a q and a option where you can type your questions for the presenter. As we go through, we will try to answer as many as possible and leave some time at the end for q and a. I’m thrilled to welcome Alicia Bronc here today. She currently works for N-T-I-D-R-I-T in the A-S-L-I-E department and she’s also a coordinator for CIDI certified deaf interpreter certification. So I’ll hand it over to you. Alicia.

Alisha Bronk:

Hello everyone. Thank you so much and thank you. GoReact for having me today. So I want to talk a little bit about bit how I got into a SL depiction and classifiers. So I have hearing parents, you’ll see this picture of me as a child and I was taught to speak and try to hear here. My grandparents had a farm with lots of siblings and cousins that I had to play with. And then this third picture is me at age seven at the deaf school. So this was later on.

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Perfect. So I did some graduate research in Portland, Oregon and in my studies I noticed that the most important thing is visualizing A SL in classifiers. When we’re doing interpreting or a SL studies, you have to have a visual picture of what things look like. I think that’s the most important thing. So in my master’s degree research, this is what I found. Next slide. So I think visualization is really important to show what things look like and there are different ways that you can do that. You can use non-manual signals, you can use classifiers use of space depiction. Next slide.

So I wanted to show this visual between how deaf brains work versus hearing brains. Hearing people tend to rely on their senses. So the sense of hearing, smell, touch, et cetera. As deaf people, we have heightened other senses as a result of the loss of the one sense of hearing. So you can see in this picture that you have this full language, this visual aspect is expanded in the brain and that’s why we are able to recognize things better in our visual surroundings. You can see by comparison in a hearing brain, that visual aspect is much smaller. It doesn’t take over the majority of the brain and so they struggled to use that depiction. Next slide. So depiction and classifiers must include most or all of these features. So classifiers role shifting, non-manual signals, facial grammar, use of space, eye gaze point of view, which means whether you’re looking at something from somebody’s perspective, you are assigning something from the person that had that happen to them’s perspective. So wherever you’re looking, so a SL language encompasses all of that. We can see every direction that this picture is coming from.

Next slide.

So this graphic I think all ties into each other. So facial expressions, grammar speeding means your pace of sign. There’s a range there that you can have. Nose, mouth, cheeks is just different movements that you can make with your face, your eyebrows, your eyes. All of that has to work together. If you don’t have one of these aspects, the language becomes unclear. So if you, for example, are very slow paced in your signing, sometimes you lose the message. Sometimes if you have no facial expressions or non-manual signals, it’s a struggle to understand someone because you’re missing part of the meaning, part of the structure of the language. And a SL and English have that way of, you have to have interchangeable language in order to make this understandable with all of these features.

So in my research I discovered some things that were also very important for classifiers. So there’s some features that we use in classifiers, supination palm up, pronation, palm orientation down or the sides. There are rules in a SL for how we use classifiers and how we move our hands. So typically when you have palm up orientation, it represents something soft palm down orientation, the back of your hand represents something hard. Next slide. So I can’t see you in the audience, but you’ll see we usually would sign it like this jump, right? You put palm up, jump because this is the softer part of your hand, which represents the softness or springiness of the trampoline.

Surfing we usually put palm down when we say surfing, because the surfboard is a hard surface, we don’t often use palm up orientation or never use palm up orientation for that next slide. So this index finger out like when you’re vomiting the signs for vomiting or a runny nose, a bloody nose, let’s see, it’s something coming out of the body, something like that. We use those classification. Pinky finger in typically means it’s coming into your body. So an IV draining into your body, pouring liquid into a can or a jar. Next slide. And then we use hand positions front and back. So this you keep the same movement, the same direction. So if you’re lying on your back, you would flip somebody over like that. This would be the first person or the front of the person. This would be how the person sits. So sometimes when we’re teaching a SL, we make a certain sign and one will mean up, one will mean down. It’s kind of confusing for students to understand that orientation. Next slide.

In this example of a person falling, so if you were to sign falling, like this means they landed on their back rolling. Now you would sign this way instead of signing the word, the sign rolling, you could just depict that with a classifier. Next slide. There are eight types of classifiers. I’ll briefly touch on each of them. Some of them you may be familiar with already. Next slide. The first, let me just give you an example of this. So the semantic classifier, you start with a person with your index finger. If this person is walking very stiffly, very hurriedly, you would use your facial expressions and the motion of that finger and it would look like this.

So expressing a sense of urgency versus a slower paced walking would require all of those elements. Next slide. For body classifiers, this means that you would use your whole body. For instance, if I have a friend with me, I stayed with a friend in South America for about a month. He was wonderful and he taught me so many things about culture, et cetera. And we stayed in the jungle and he was telling me he was hearing and we were standing next to each other and he was using his full body to wrap his arm around me for this photo. So this is an example of using body classifier. Next slide.

So body part classifier indicates using a portion of your body, for instance, your legs. So currently as I’m speaking, you can’t see my legs. So you would transfer what you’re doing with your legs to a different part of your body. So for instance, this crossing your legs, you can’t see my feet or my legs right now for me to show you. So you would transfer that over to your fingers to represent your legs. You transfer that sign to another part of your body to represent what you’re trying to show. Tapping your feet. This is another one you would transfer to your hands to show that. And that’s just a simple representation of what your feet might be doing. A friend of mine made a great example and I think we should all maybe practice this. Go ahead and click next and we can go ahead and start this video. Okay, it looks like the video is not showing.

Okay, I guess that’s what happens when it’s copied. Okay, I will, I’ll try to describe it the best I can. So when a person is walking or doing squats, you would use your fingers like this to show doing squats, kicking your legs, doing those stretches where you’re stretching your legs up by your face, moving your both legs up. And the way you move your mouth and the way you move your face determines the intensity of that. Another way that you could do that is for instance, dancing and how you move your legs when you’re dancing. So that first example versus this example of being on the tips of your toes, you can show walking backwards, but again, when you’re showing action, you’re showing this front view of what a foot looks like and there are rules about what H shapes you make. If it’s hot outside and you’re showing a child walking on hot cement, this is a way you could do that.

So there are different ways that we can represent what that looks like. You could show marching, like marching in a parade or something like that. Often the movies will show someone doing stunts and tricks and flip and land in different ways. We can do that with classifiers. We can show that in a body movement with our fingers. And again, it’s important to include facial expressions as well. Next slide element classifiers. This is regarding weather. You would use an open hand or your index finger if you’re describing wind or water dripping, it’s just spitting a little bit of rain. You can also use that index finger to show lightning. You can show an open five hand shape for snow for pouring rain, rain for tornado, for fire.

So those have rules about shape. You can show waterfall. Next slide. So depiction is important. Depiction is what you see. Next slide. So what you’re seeing, what this looks like, again, how your non-manual signals apply to what you’re trying to say. Next slide. Okay, so look at this image. You might be able to see it. There’s a person there who is going across the great wall of China. And in order for me to describe that, I’d first have to determine my point of view. So my point of view would be standing looking at the wall off in a distance. And this is what it looks like. Again, you would use your facial expressions to describe that.

So you describe what you see first from a distance, and then you would change your point of view to become that person’s point of view. The person on the great wall of China, what it looks like inside that wall, how long it is, how steep it is. And you would use your eye gaze to track where you were going or where the great wall was leading. So I stayed for three months in China. I was at the Great Wall of China and in Russia and Mongolia. So Mongolia was slightly below Russia and they were at war and China was told that they were going to be overtaken. And so China hurriedly constructed the great wall of China as quickly as they could to protect their borders. And so you’ll see these forts every so often along the wall were for soldiers to keep watch, to see if there were enemy armies coming.

So if we were to go from Boston to California, that’s the same distance as this entire great wall of China. So a lot of work went into this great next slide. So I also did some research in Surinam. This is the sign. And they had a lot of different cuisine. They had what was called jumbo food. So you have these green onions and in America we’re used to them being very small. Now do you see how I’m describing the difference with these jumbo green onions? My eye gaze is different, my mouth movement is different. And then carrots as well. You could get carrots that were huge.

So this is how I would describe that. So here in America our carrots are very small green beans. This is what they would look like if I was to sign and describe that watermelon, this is what they look like in America. But everything in surinam was much larger. I thought maybe they were injecting their food with something, but they said because they’re so close to the equator that it’s just very fertile soil that they have. And so their food just grows much larger. So the important thing to remember is we need to have an open mind for those who are coming in. If they’re asking for a bigger piece of fruit or vegetable, we just need to remember that other people experience food differently than we do. Next slide.

So I want you to try to picture what oars look like and how you would describe an ore or how they work. So you see this dragon at the front, you would describe the shape of the boat. How would you describe the people sitting here in pairs? You wouldn’t describe it from the side even though that’s what we are seeing is a side view, but all the signs that we make are easier to see when you’re facing it head on. How would you sign oars? So there’s oars on each side. So how do I show that view at the same time? This is what I would do. I would use my whole body. So I’m rocking forward and they have a drummer that signals when they need to move their oars. So all of these people in this boat are deaf, but they are able to feel that drum and they’re able to follow the beat of that drum to make their oars move at the same time. And they have to race to grab a flag. So they go really close to land, somebody has to grab the flag and then they go off in the other direction, back to the starting point. Then they have someone at the rudder that can steer them. This is how I would sign that next slide.

Alright, this is how I would sign it in the view of the person holding the snapping turtle. I had a Russian friend of mine, we went, I have a cabin up in northern Wisconsin. So we were on an A TV and I saw, so in English, I would say saw in a SLI would do this. So do you see the difference here? So I spotted a snapping turtle and I was so excited. So I wouldn’t sign in English. I’m going to pick up the turtle. You would just use your body, use all the grammar features to use your whole body to show how you were grabbing this turtle. Because I was so excited. My face is showing that. And I picked it up and a friend of mine took a picture of me and then she got kind of a worried look on her face and I said, what’s wrong? And so she was describing the look of the turtle. I want you to maybe think about what that looks like. Does the turtle look happy? I imagine probably not. If you can see it was kind of lumbering along and I picked it up so excited and all of a sudden these claws came out and this very angry snapping turtle with an open mouth and kind of a swollen throat lifted his head up.

So like this. So you’ll see my mouth is making the same movement that the turtle’s mouth is making. And I looked down and it looked at me and it was really close to coming at me and I checked it and it landed on the ground and just lumbered away. Still I’m sure angry at me. So this is a snapping turtle I didn’t realize. But if you were to get a bite from a snapping turtle, you would probably go to the hospital or the doctor, you may have to get your arm amputated. And I was like, yeah, I’m not, no thank you. I’m not doing that.

Most snapping turtles tend to bite a person’s foot or lower leg near the ankle. That’s where the bites tend to happen. If you come across a snapping turtle, it doesn’t often happen that somebody gets bit on the arm, but exposure to a snapping turtle is very dangerous. So again, you’ve seen from the way I’ve described this story, the difference between just a nice normal turtle versus a snapping turtle. You’ve seen in the description the severity of that situation. Next slide. Okay, I’d like to ask for four volunteers. I don’t know if we’re able to do that with Zoom. Maybe we can just move forward. But if there are four people that are willing to sign, but you see this accident, so there’s a truck and a boat that have crashed against this pole, what would that look like? How would you describe that? Do we have a volunteer that’s willing to jump on screen with us? Any volunteers? Yeah, we can change the settings for anybody that volunteers. I don’t see anybody. Alright, we have about 15 minutes left. I’m saying I’m Scott, I’m not sure if Alicia’s seeing Scott, Molly saying, yeah, we have somebody that popped in. Alicia, just so you know. Alright, can we put up that picture again and then we can see if Scott can do some classifier depiction. Perfect. All right. Go for it.

Yeah. Yeah. Great. All right. So you chose this hand shape for the boat and the car. Okay, great. All right, thank you. Another volunteer. Molly, do you see anybody? Molly, you want to give it a try? All right, go for it. Great. Okay. Yeah, very similar to Scott’s. It’s good. Why did you pick this handshake for the boat? Do you remember what I was teaching from the beginning? Molly says, well, I think because typically this is the way we sign a truck and trailer. So it’s uphold something. Yeah, but a boat, we have a classifier that we use typically for a boat. So you can sign it like this because remember palm orientation determines whether something is soft or hard. The bottom of a boat is very hard, but it’s hollow in the middle on top. So the way you describe the truck getting hit or running into the pole was great.

Here’s something you could use for the boat instead. So again, you could sign it the way that you did. That’s great. But we have a current sign for a boat. I know that we don’t use that sign often to describe a truck pulling a boat behind it, but when we’re trying to describe it in terms of this accident, you can see that you would do that, you would describe that a little bit differently. And then for the truck, sometimes we use a three hand shape for a vehicle accident or a vehicle driving, we can determine how fast, how slow, what direction they’re going. And if there’s no contact with anything else, you can use that three hand shape. But if you’re talking about traffic or a car accident or something like that, you need to use that flat handshake because that three hand shape doesn’t really work. It’s not a very natural movement for your wrist. But when you use a flat H shape, you can describe the movement and direction of a car in an accident, whether it’s rolling over or something like that. But yeah, the three handshake would be used if nothing’s touching it. So if it had rolled off a cliff and it was suspended or something like that with nothing touching it, you could use that three handshake. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Okay, next slide.

Alright, we want to talk about the spectrum of using non-manual signals. Next slide. Okay. Alright, describe this car accident. So this first blue car on the top left, you’ll see that the fender offender has just been smashed in a little bit. It’s just a minor accident. You could probably pop that out. The second vehicle has been hit head on and it’s totally destroyed. It looks like the back is okay, but the front is totally destroyed and that’s probably a pretty severe repair that needs to be made. And I would say the bottom one is totally destroyed. You definitely would call that totaled. It would be irreparable from front to back. It looks like just totally damaged. So there’s three different intensities of these car accidents and you can describe that in different intensities using those classifiers and your facial expression. Next slide.

Alright, it looks like we have about five minutes left. Let’s go to the next slide. Alright, this is just a practice. Alright, again, depiction, there’s six aspects. So what are you seeing in this example? So you see pond, moth jar have to have holes in the top of the jar. It needs to be in a place by a refrigerator away from heat. So there’s six aspects to this depiction that you need to describe. Next slide. Alright, so here’s to give you an idea of what the pond looks like, what the moth looks like, what the jar should look like with the holes in the lid and the refrigerator.

Alright, can you go back one slide to that English description? Great. Okay. Now I want you to pretend you’re in the role of an instructor or an interpreter and this is just an activity or homework assignment that you’ve been given. So I would say to you, please go to this pond. You need to catch a moss, but you have to have a jar to catch them off and put it in and it has to have air holes for ventilation. And I wouldn’t sign for breathing or specific English words. I could just sign this. And then it needs to be placed on top of a refrigerator away from the heat vent and the back of the refrigerator. It needs to stay close to the front of the refrigerator. So that’s a very easy way to describe that. If I was to sign that in English, I would say go to the pond, catch a moth, make sure your jar has holes in it because we have to make sure the moth can breathe and you need to make sure you put it on the top of the refrigerator, keep it away from a heat source.

So it’s a struggle in a SL to process that. When we use classifiers, it makes it so much easier to understand and visualize. So when we’re using a SL grammar, it just makes a message so much more clear. So that’s just one example. Next slide? Yeah, next slide. Alright, for time we’ll skip this activity. So can you go to the next slide please? Okay. These are really helpful examples of some books that you can use in a SL. These books really help deaf children and family members, people that speak different languages. There are some signs and they’ll move really slowly and they’ll show you the motion of the sign and the motion of your hand and your mouth. I think once the tortoise in the hair. So it’ll show the turtle and when the flag is waved to start the race, then this is what the rabbit would look like.

So you could see the dust trailing from the rabbit because he is moving so quickly, the turtle having to wave the dust out of his face. So showing that in pictorial form is so much easier than using those English words. Like the turtle is walking very slowly and the rabbit raced past him, the same thing, the boy who cried wolf. So you would move your eyes in certain directions, you would move your body in certain directions in order to tell that story. So these are really great examples that you can use to help you get out of that English form and show in true a SL. Next slide.

Okay, so this is just one page from one of those books. This one’s called Annie’s Tails. Again, you can’t see behind me so I can’t actually show you a tail. So you would move this to a different location in your body, I think. Is it a rabbit? Yeah, a rabbit. So you could see this fluffy tail on this bunny. I would put it on my hand instead of on my back because you can’t see it very well there. So the bunny has a fluffy tail and they have one animal for every day, one animal tail for each day. So on Tuesday she opens this box and she sees this fluffy white bunny tail. But she says there are no whiskers, there are no ears. And you can see me looking down representing the mother and she says, oh look, well you can make this to look like the bunny. You can cut out ears to put on the bunny. You can draw whiskers to make the bunny. So again, I look up representing the child, I look down representing mother. Next slide. Next slide.

Go ahead to the next one. Yeah, we won’t play this video. You can just go to the next one. Alright. Another really useful thing is this spy versus spy. So this will give you really good practice. It has no words, but it’ll just show you some different pictures. Next slide. You’ve see an example. This one is also great. Dak is really amazing at showing rhythm with the music and how these animals are moving. This is another great tool for you to practice those a SL classifiers. Next slide. There are so many ways to be creative, a lot of resources to use. And thank you for being here. I appreciate it so much.