Burch, Daniel, O’Brien, Sharon, and Novitsky, Mary Lou. Ready! Set! Sign! (RSS)., 2001. CD-ROM for Windows. Ready! Set! Sign! LLC, P.O. Box 6676, Arlington, Virginia 22206. Website: www.readysetsign.com. System requirements: Pentium 166MMX, 32MB RAM, 10MB HDD, 8x CD-ROM, SVGA color monitor with 800x600 display pixels, sound card and speakers, Windows Media Player 6.4, and mouse. Package contains 5 CD lesson diskettes, 1 3-1/2” authorization diskette, 1 demonstration CD, and a paper copy of User’s Guide. The authorization diskette needs to be installed in order to use the lesson CDs. The first diskette installs Windows Media Player if the system lacks it. The User’s Guide tells how to install and suggests ways to navigate throughout segments within the diskettes.

Ready! Set! Sign! (RSS) is a 24-lesson computer-based course in sign language that is designed for beginning signers from age 10 on who wish to learn basic signs and grammar in sign language. The first of the 5 CD lesson diskettes covers lessons 1 and 2, the second diskette covers lessons 3-7, the third, 8-13, the fourth, 14-17, and the fifth, 18-24. The diskettes contain over 1,250 signs, with over 1,750 practice sessions, dealing with basic signs, major grammar concepts, fingerspelling, and numbers. The lesson diskettes also contain 29 Cultural Moment segments with information about deafness and deaf people, community, and culture in the U.S. and internationally.

This course appears to follow an audio-lingual instruction model, and its lessons generally proceed in five segments. The Instruction segment shows lesson goals with examples of signs and grammar concepts. The Targeted Vocabulary segment consists of signs and explanations of their formation and etiology (some lessons, however, have no Targeted Vocabulary segment). The Practice segment contains demonstration of grammar concepts using targeted lexical signs. The Wrap-Up segment is a review of the lesson with more lexical signs. Each lesson ends with one or more Cultural Moment segments. Viewers are expected to watch an insert screen with signers, hear voiced or read captioned instructions, and imitate sign and sentence formations by the signers.

As the course proceeds, the complexity of the linguistic features increases. Starting with 100 signs that the viewer is assumed to know already, and that consist mostly of iconic and pantomimic gestures and facial expressions, early lessons cover lexical signs and grammar concepts that revolve around people, food, clothes, animals, sizes, shapes, and actions. Middle lessons cover fingerspelling, acronyms, and initialized signs, as well as their use to represent moving things and people seeing and talking. Later lessons cover signs and grammar concepts that deal with personal characteristics, directions, distances, locations, feelings, numbers, senses, math operators, size, placement, plurals, speed, intensity, duration, directionality, questions, time concepts, mental processes, feelings, opinions, and wants and needs.

Design and evaluation of a course packet in sign language ought to follow ACTFL’s Professional Standards, which promote a content-based communicative model. While there are various sign systems, ranging from American Sign Language (ASL) to Manually Coded English (MCE), with Pidgin Sign English (PSE) being a combination of these two systems, the sign language taught in classrooms today is ASL. A course in ASL centers on content areas and moves concentrically from the person and his/her immediate environs and interests to other people, activities, institutions, places, interests, history, community, and culture. The course typically starts with sets of lexical signs, their phono-morphological and morphological-syntactical modifications, and grammatical constructions, and follows a communicative-interactive, question-answer, discussion, and projects-and-activities pedagogical paradigm.

This program, unfortunately, does not follow current practices in sign language instruction. It is not interactive. It provides instruction on signs and grammar without reference to the content or context in which they are used. In addition, it is unclear which sign systems RSS employs. Its signs and sentences are inconsistent: some lexical signs are iconic and pantomimic, some are in MCE form, and others are in ASL. In addition, sentences contain frozen, not productive, signs; they contain no ASL rules for incorporation of NMS, nonconcatenative morphological processes, some numbers, tenses, aspect, and time, null pronouns, agreement verbs, and locative verbs. For instance, in lesson 16, concepts of speed, intensity, duration, and directionality are taught in separate sentences without the nonconcatenative processes. The program needs to cover conventional grammatical constructions, that is, with phono-morphological and morpho-syntactical processes in ASL that are found in sign language classes.

However, RSS does have some strengths. It provides exercises that teachers can use in their classrooms and they can also draw vocabulary and some sentences from the diskettes. The lessons in RSS are clearly presented. Teachers can use the Targeted Vocabulary segments for signs and explanations of their formation and etiology, and the Practice segments for the generous number of sentences that enable viewers to integrate signs into grammar concepts. They can additionally make use of lessons on number, aspect, creating faces, fingerspelling, and lexicalized signs; these lessons are helpful. Likewise the Cultural Moment segments are useful because they provide a wealth of pertinent information.

Students practicing their sign and sentence constructions can use RSS in classrooms or at home. They are able to control their pace, vocabulary development, and sentence formation. Furthermore, the diskettes have research tools to aid them in finding signs, as well as teaching videos for group instruction; and by using Sign Search, students can choose topics that interest them. Finally, Daniel, Sharon, and Mary Lou, the hosts, are friendly and funny, and make students feel comfortable learning sign language.

Dr. Russell S. Rosen

Program in the Teaching of American Sign Language as a Foreign Language

Teachers College

Columbia University

New York City