Does ASL fulfill your university/college Foreign Language Requirement?

[Jennifer Dickinson]

Hi everyone,
The College of Arts and Sciences at my university is considering (once 
again) whether to include ASL in the list of languages that fulfill the 
foreign language requirement.  I have been asked to gather some background 
resources for consideration by the college curriculum committee, although I 
do not have much knowledge of sign languages beyond that of your "average" 
linguistic anthropologist.  If any of you could provide information related 
to the questions below, it would be a great supplement to the materials I 
have been putting together, and I will be happy to summarize the 
information and post it back to the list in a week or two.  Here is what 
would be most helpful for me to know given the questions that are being 
raised here at UVM, but feel free to send me other information or key sources!

1.  Does your university/college have a foreign language requirement, how 
many semesters/credits is it, and can students take ASL to satisfy the 
requirement?

2.  Can you recommend resources on how other universities have resolved 
this issue? (I'm thinking of sites along the lines of BU's 
http://www.bu.edu/asllrp/fl/)

3.  Can you recommend good resources that discuss Deaf culture(s) as 
distinct from mainstream American culture, and that would be accessible to 
a non-linguist/non-anthropologist reader?

4.  Any information/studies on ASL writing systems OR equivalent sources on 
a visual literature for ASL?




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Jennifer Dickinson
Assistant Professor
Dept. of Anthropology
University of Vermont