<p>D enrolled in Spanish 1 this fall at the hs, and withdrew when her grade dropped to a D by mid first semester due to her lack of attention to detail and an exacting teacher. To get into local state schools, 2 years of foreign language in hs are required. D's neuropsych evaluation found visuospatial difficulties especially when performing motor functions. She is being encouraged to try ASL at the local cc next summer. I am wondering how kids with that profile do in ASL? My logical side tells me this won't work, but the school routine sends kids with IEPs on this path. Any experience with ASL?</p>
<p>Not sure about how well kids do. However, I can tell you from experience as someone fluent in ASL that American Sign Language is not very “exacting” as compared to the English Language, or even English Sign Language. In ASL, people skip over some small words and instead appear to tell stories through their signs. In English signing, people generally sign every single word in the sentence. So I would imagine that ASL might be easier to learn. This is just my personal theory.</p>
<p>I would highly encourage ASL, it would be nice to spread the knowledge/</p>
<p>If your child has learned her first language to the level of fluency typical for a high school student, that would indicate that her brain’s language centers are not impaired. Her ability to master any of the other human languages used on this planet at the present time (or in the case of a “dead” language, in the past) is less a result of her learning differences than of the specific teaching methodologies used by the language instructor. And there is an awful lot of really bad language instruction out there!</p>
<p>Ask around for references for specific ASL instructors, and send her to the class section taught by someone you’ve learned good things about.</p>
<p>Wishing both of you all the best.</p>
<p>I’ve taken ASL at school. Having a nice/fun teacher probably made me biased, but I thought it much easier than written languages. ASL was very intuitive for me, but took longer for me to become “smooth” at forming even simple sentences, because you have to keep practicing at it rather than just memorizing vocabulary and grammar. I practiced in front of my mirror often and to my friends (who were probably extremely annoyed 
).</p>
<p>I’d think that if you could dedicate yourself to it, ASL is valuable. I actually interacted with a deaf kid for the first time last week - it was very fun and I’m visiting him again next weekend!</p>
<p>^Nice! I am deaf myself by the way. It’s always nice to see more of this happening!</p>