Rationale:

Every Caribbean territory has a Deaf community, which has a vernacular language. These languages represent important linguistic minorities in the Caribbean. However, their structures have never been formally taught. As a result, there is a strong demand amongst educators of the deaf for more information on these sign languages as linguistic systems. This course is aimed at exposing students to the structure of a Caribbean Sign Language as a linguistic system and will introduce them to communication in a visual-gestural mode. As an exemplification of this mode, students will be given instruction and practice sentences in a Caribbean sign language to develop basic communicative skills in that language and to gain exposure to the local Deaf culture.

At the end of this course, students should be able to: -

• discuss basic theories on the linguistic structure of the language, including the shape of the signs, sign order, semantics, and other linguistic phenomena
• demonstrate basic skills in communicating in a Caribbean sign language

• Basic Conversation
• Cherology
  o Signing Space
  o Parameters of a Sign
  o Basic Cherological Processes
• Morphosyntax
  o Time Line
  o Verb Types – Plain, Directional and Locative
  o Word Order
  o Sentence Types
  o Classifiers
  o Word Formation
  o Indexing
• Pragmatics
  o Cross cultural communication (Deaf and Hearing Social Groups)
  ? How do I converse with you effectively?
  

• Lectures
• Tutorials
• Group Activities
  
  

• 50% - 2 Visual In-course tests (25% each)
• 50% - Written final examination, 2 hours