Professional Development Activity 1

Georgia State University

Applied Linguistics
Spring 2011
Jonathan Shive
For this Professional Development Activity I taught a workshop for The Registry
of Interpreter for the Deaf, RID. RID is the national interpreter professional association.
They provide national testing for certification as an interpreter and as well CEUs for
certification maintenance. I presented this for Georgia Perimeter College. The workshop
was entitled Classifiers: More Than a Handshape and was presented February 19, 2011.
The target audience was for working interpreters and student interpreters.
The workshop was set up, focusing on the definition, explanation and use of
classifiers in American Sign Language. A classifier is a grammatical feature of ASL that
takes advantage of the 3D modality of ASL. Quite simply, it is a given handshape that can
take place of a noun, modulate a verb, define a physical characteristic, and give adverbial
and adjectival information and many other uses. The complexity of classifiers is one,
which language learners often struggle with.
For the presentation part of the workshop, I used Prezi, a new presentation web
based application. Its graphic and media integration is seamless and far better than Power
Point. In the workshop evaluations, many participants commented on the use or Prezi,
they really seemed to enjoy it. The presentation began by define what classifiers are. The
parts of speech were discussed, and the specific types and categories. Then the
participants had to individually identify part of classifiers, their semantic meanings,

syntactic functions and use of matching non-manual markers. There are facial and
eyebrow movements that provide deeper semantic meaning and grammatical nuisances.
Next participants divided up with pairs where they seated and were shown a series
of images. With the partner, they had to figure out how to describe the images in ASL. I
floated around the auditorium and provided feedback or help. Next we went up to the
sentential level, and they did English to ASL sentence translations. After a break, we
came back and I have 5 video narratives, with heavy use of classifiers. I showed them to
the attendee and after we discussed them, breaking down the classifiers and their meaning
and usage. Between each video we debriefed and discussed as needed.
The final two and a half hours was center time. I used the old tried and true center
method from kindergarten teachers everywhere. I had a total of six centers, each with its
own focus and objectives. They centers were as follows: Go Fish, Match Box Cars, Old
Maid, Picture Difference, Picture Elaboration and Identify IT. Go Fish was the actual
game, yet on the card was a picture of a fish, so instead of asking for the name of the fish,
the player had to describe the fish. If correct, they earned their card. Old Maid was the
same way. For the Match Box cars, I had an assistant and she would use the cars, act out
a scene for the attendee to describe and use classifiers to re-enact. The picture difference
center had two very similar pictures, with 10 differences in them. The Pairs, without
seeing their partners picture had to figure out the differences. Picture Elaborations was
just that, I gave them a picture, the participant had to analyze it and then in ASL describe
it to the group. The group would then discuss it and make any suggestions for
improvement. The final center was Identify IT. I had 10 page of rows and columns of
images, most were icon, hats, chairs, or cartoon animals. Each partner was given the

photo copy and to pick one image, describe it to their partner and the partner had to
describe it back, and then point to the one on the copy.
I feel these centers were a huge success. These were adult participants and I
havent heard people laughing and have such a good time while learning. Evaluations
showed they loved the centers, but because of the fun, but because they really applied
what they just learned. That hand on, immediate feedback was what they really liked.
Over all I feel this workshop was a roaring success, students learned, laughed and
feedback showed it was beneficial. I plan on proposing this to a few local state chapters
of RID.