Students with a strong command of ASL can better understand the structure and lexicon of English if they can relate how an idea is conveyed in ASL to how it is conveyed in English. There are several techniques for accomplishing this. Comparison of semantics can be very beneficial. Sometimes, discourse is organized differently in two languages. For expository contexts, ASL users tend to start with the specific and move to the general.
English users tend to start with the general and move to the specific.
Perhaps a conscious knowledge of this difference could help students in both reading and writing of English. Students offer examples of these and more. Then I show them a sentence on the board or computer. This sentence has a list with about four or five items, but I leave out the commas. A real challenge is if some of the words in the list could easily belong with the item before and after it.