"There are more than 500,000 words in the English language, but a person who masters only 250 words will recognize more than two-thirds of all words shown in television captions -- provided the 250 words are those that are most frequently used. Equally dramatic, a beginning reader could be taught just 10 words: the, you, to, a, I, and, of, in, it, that -- and then recognize more than one out of every five words. Mastery of the top 79 words means being able to read half of all words captioned." (Source: Perspectives in Education and Deafness, Volume 16, Number 1, September/October 1997)
It is very hard for humans to resist the urge to want to learn a list of colors, a list of food, or a list of pretty much anything -- or in other words "topic-based" lists. The problem is – learning topic-based lists actually slows down a student’s journey toward being able to hold real life conversations in the most efficient learning path possible.
The basis of the Lifeprint curriculum isn't a list of topics but rather the basis of Lifeprint is "frequency of use."
Thus the real topics in the Lifeprint curriculum are:
Lesson 1: "very frequently used concepts,"
Lesson 2: "very frequently used concepts but slightly less frequently than Lesson 1.”
Lesson 3: "very frequently used concepts but slightly less frequently than Lesson 2.”
Lesson 4: "very frequently used concepts but slightly less frequently than Lesson 3.”
Lesson 5: and so forth through to lesson 60 and on into the vocabulary expansion series.
I’m not being facetious here.
The lessons are not intended to be topic based. Some of the lessons did coalesce somewhat into what could loosely be described as a "topic” (which is what I listed up above) but that is immaterial to the curriculum – teaching a series of topic lists is not the goal since it impedes rapid acquisition of language.
For example, the sign for "cousin” is not introduced in "Lesson 2” along with brother and sister even though ostensibly Lesson 2 could be labeled as the "family” lesson. The sign for cousin is introduced in lesson 29. Why? The reason why is because we don’t talk about cousins as much as we discuss most of the concepts in lessons 3 through 28. If we give "cousin” space in an early lesson it takes away space that could have been invested in a more frequently used concept – which would slow down the student’s ability to quickly start having meaningful conversations.
The overall concept here is that in ASL 1 students learn and master 300 of the most frequently used signed concepts – not grouped by topic -- but rather introduced by frequency of real world usage.
In addition to those concepts students also learn fingerspelling, numbers, some culture, some history, a lot of terminology, and a significant amount of interconnecting information. By interconnecting information I’m referring to how one sign relates to another sign and/or delimitations of signs such as the fact that the sign commonly glossed as "BED” can not be used to refer to the bed of a truck nor a flower bed. The students also learn a significant amount of response vocabulary (via watching the interactive instructional videos) introduced when my student model responds organically to questions. The student’s responses are real and reflective of real world interaction but are typically not codified into the curriculum. Thus we have a type of meta-information that is included throughout the curriculum but not listed under a "topic.”
I could go on and on describing why "frequency” beats topic-based learning but really if someone doesn’t believe and get it (understand the efficacy of it) no amount of explaining is going to satisfy the person if they want to see a series of lists: Lesson 1: "classroom signs” Lesson 2: "family” Lesson 3: "places” ... yadda, yadda.
