Silent competition

Charles H. Featherstone/Columbia Basin Herald Moses Lake High School students Grace Sanchez, Courtney Hanson, Keelie Waters, and Rebecca Lakoduk enjoy a little lunch after a grueling sign language competition Saturday at Moses Lake High School.

by Charles H. Featherstone Staff Writer
| March 13, 2017 3:00 AM

MOSES LAKE — Courtney Hanson describes American Sign Language (ASL) as “the Yoda language.”

“We talk backward all the time,” the 16-year-old said in-between bites of pizza outside the common room at Moses Lake High School.

It’s Saturday, and Hanson is one of five Moses Lake High School students – all girls – who are at the high school for a nearly day-long ASL competition. Thirty-five students from seven high schools across Eastern Washington were in Moses Lake to show off their ASL skills.

With the top six school hopefully moving on to a statewide competition in April.

While there is a version of sign language that is a direct translation of English, ASL is its own separate language — complete with its own grammar — and it’s taught that way at Moses Lake High School.

“In English, we say, ‘I am going to the store,’” explained Kristi Couch, ASL teacher at Moses Lake High School. “In ASL, I sign, ‘store I go to.’”

Couch says many of the small words in English – definite and indefinite articles, the verb “to be” – are simply not used in ASL. A number of languages across the world – such as Russian and Arabic – make little use of the verb “to be.”

“It’s a totally different language,” Couch said. “Emphasis can be communicated through facial expression, body language, even the speed of signing. It’s a very visual language.”

Couch said students were grilled by a panel of judges – as individuals and as school teams – in four areas. First, they had to describe and tell a story about a picture in no less than a minute and a half and no more than three minutes. Second, they had to watch a video of someone signing and pick the best English translation. They had to take a comprehensive exam on deaf culture. And last, they had 40 minutes to come up with an acrostic story using each letter of the alphabet, and then as a team tell that story to the judges.

Despite the presence of 35 teenagers, the common room at Moses Lake High school is quiet for lunch. That doesn’t mean no one is talking, it just means it’s “voices off” for the day as kids use their hands and their bodies to communicate.

“This has been a good opportunity,” said Rebecca Lakoduk, a 16-year-old junior. “I’d like to go into interpreting, because in learning ASL, I know what it feels like not to be able communicate.”

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached via email at countygvt@columbiabasinherald.com