Students will have the opportunity to take an American Sign Language class next semester resulting from a collaboration between Student Government and the linguistics department.
William Edmiston, chairman of the Languages, Literatures and Cultures Department, confirmed the class would be offered this fall.
"It has been approved by the (faculty) senate, and it's been approved for the fall," he said. The class, ASLG 121, will be offered during the fall semester from 5:30 p.m. to 7:15 p.m.
SG President Zachery Scott said the initiative for the class had been one of his pet projects for a long time.
"It was actually an effort that I started about a year and a half ago," he said. "Finally I had to approach a professor, Stanley Dubinsky. I told him I was interested in starting up this class, and he was very willing. He'd tried to do it in the past, but the foreign language departments thought that would infringe on the other languages."
Dubinsky said the languages, literatures and cultures department used to be broken down into the French department, Classics department, Spanish department, Italian department and Portuguese and the Germanic, Slavic and East Asian Languages department, which was "pretty much the department of everything left over."
He said that there was really no place for ASL classes to fit.
"We had considered developing and offering them with sort of a linguistics imprimatur," he said. "But now it makes more sense to put them in Languages, Literatures and Cultures, now that there aren't any departments of particular languages."
Advocates expect the ASL courses to improve the university's image. Scott anticipates the program will help USC compete with other schools, as well as provide a community service.
"We're losing a lot of good students to places where they're known for their accessibility to handicapped students," he said.
"I think if we offer this, one, we make the university more attractive to those types of students, and two, we help this problem of a shortage of sign linguists in South Carolina and the country."
Dubinsky said ASL is widely used. "There are good reasons for having it," he said, "American Sign Language is, after Spanish, the third most widely-used language in this state."
Second-year accounting student Maria Bravo said she thought the class was a good idea. She said she had been exposed to sign language for the first time in elementary school but that she hadn't encountered it since then. "I think a class like that would be very useful," she said, "and I would definitely be willing to take a class like that."
She said it might help USC compete in the field. "It would certainly be another option for students that are disabled," she said.
The course, Elementary American Sign Language, had just two seats, out of 20, filled by Sunday afternoon.
Clemson University already has a thriving five-course ASL program, headed by Alton Brant, the only sign language professor in the state. The curriculum also includes a culture course, called Deaf Studies in the United States.
Edmiston said although USC's 121 and planned 122 courses won't count for foreign language credit, it's possible that they might be approved in the future.
"We had to find some people to teach it and then we had to do the paperwork, and it's been kind of a long process," Edminston said. "Just this month, in April, it was approved by the faculty senate."
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