A Teacher's Guide to American Sign Language

American Sign Language at a Glance

American Sign Language (ASL) is a complete, natural language used primarily by Deaf and hard-of-hearing communities in the United States and most of English-speaking Canada. It is not a visual version of English, it has its own grammar, structure, and vocabulary that developed organically within Deaf communities over generations. ASL is a visual language: the brain processes its information through the eyes, and the shape, placement, and movement of the hands, along with facial expressions and body movements, all work together to convey meaning.

Like all languages, ASL is living, it grows and changes over time, with regional variations, generational shifts, and new vocabulary emerging as the community and the world evolve.

Why April 15?

National ASL Day falls on April 15 to mark the day the American School for the Deaf (ASD) opened in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1817. The school was founded by Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, Mason Cogswell, and Laurent Clerc (1785–1869), a Deaf educator from France. ASD became the birthplace of ASL as we know it today.

How Many People Use ASL?

Counting ASL signers is difficult because ASL users have never been included in the American census, so estimates of how many people use ASL vary widely. ASL is also widely learned as a second language. Its users include Deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals, hearing children of Deaf adults (CODAs), interpreters, family members, and second-language learners.

Forty-five U.S. states and Washington, D.C. formally recognize ASL in state law. Many high schools, colleges, and universities accept ASL in fulfillment of modern or foreign language requirements.

Before Hartford: A World of Home Signs

Before the American School for the Deaf opened, Deaf people across the United States had no shared language. Many used "home signs", informal gestural systems developed within their own families. At the same time, several communities had already developed richer local sign languages. Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts had an unusually high rate of hereditary deafness, and a local sign language there, Martha's Vineyard Sign Language, was used even by hearing residents whenever a Deaf person was present. Similar village sign languages had developed in Henniker, New Hampshire and Sandy River Valley, Maine.

Origins: A Language Is Born (1817)

When Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, Mason Cogswell, and Laurent Clerc opened the American School for the Deaf in Hartford on April 15, 1817, students arrived from across New England and brought their home signs and village sign languages with them. Clerc, who was also the school's first teacher, used French Sign Language (LSF), but notably, he later reported that he often learned the students' signs rather than simply teaching his own. From that rich situation of language contact, something new emerged: a language that blended Martha's Vineyard Sign Language, other regional village sign languages, French Sign Language, and students' home signs into what would become ASL. Modern research finds about 58% of ASL signs are related to Old French Sign Language signs, but that's well below the 80% threshold linguists use to call two varieties dialects, confirming that ASL was always its own distinct language, shaped profoundly by the American Deaf students who created it.

Spread and Growth

More schools for the Deaf followed the ASD, and as graduates spread out across the country, they carried ASL with them. National organizations like the National Association of the Deaf held conventions that brought signers together from across the country, further standardizing and spreading the language. ASL's wide geographical consistency is unusual for a sign language, it's a direct result of the ASD's early central role in Deaf education.

Suppression and Resilience

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the educational philosophy of oralism, which required Deaf students to speak and lip-read rather than sign, became dominant, particularly after an 1880 international congress of educators effectively banned sign language from schools. This period caused significant harm to the Deaf community. Many Deaf children were denied access to their language during critical years of development. Yet Deaf communities preserved ASL, largely through Deaf clubs, residential schools, and intergenerational community bonds. The language endured because its people refused to let it disappear.

Recognition: William Stokoe and the Linguistics of ASL

For much of the 20th century, linguists did not consider sign language a "true" language. That changed when linguist William Stokoe arrived at Gallaudet University in 1955 and began studying ASL systematically. His 1960 publication formally demonstrated that ASL had all the structural properties of a natural language, a finding the Deaf community had always known. Aided by the broader civil rights movement of the 1960s, Stokoe's work helped shift ASL's status from a dismissed, stigmatized form of communication to a recognized human language.

ASL Today: Rights and Recognition

The Americans with Disabilities Act (1990) helped secure the right to effective communication, including interpreters, in public services, workplaces, and businesses. More recently, governments have moved toward formal recognition of sign languages alongside spoken languages. In Canada, Saskatchewan passed legislation in 2023 recognizing ASL and Indigenous sign languages as the primary languages of communication for Deaf people in the province. Canada's federal Accessible Canada Act (2019) also recognizes ASL.

The Building Blocks of ASL

Every sign in ASL is built from five components, called parameters: handshape, location (where in space or on the body the sign is made), movement, palm orientation, and nonmanual markers (facial expressions, head position, body posture). Changing a single parameter can change the meaning, just as changing one sound turns "bat" into "cat."

Visual Rhyme: Signs That Echo Each Other

One of the most illuminating insights from ASL linguistics is that signs can "rhyme", not through sound, but through shared visual form. Just as poets writing in spoken languages choose words that echo each other sonically, ASL poets choose signs that echo each other visually. Researchers studying ASL point out that "desire" and "still" rhyme in ASL, as do many other sign pairs you would never expect to rhyme in English. Actress and Tony nominee Lauren Ridloff uses this technique in her ASL adaptation of Anne Michaels' poem "Not," selecting signs whose visual qualities resonate across lines the way sounds resonate in spoken verse.

Iconicity: When Signs Look Like What They Mean

Many ASL signs visually resemble what they represent, a quality linguists call iconicity. The sign for "drink," for example, looks like the act of drinking. The sign for "tree" resembles a tree's trunk and branches. Research shows iconicity helps people coin and learn new signs. Interestingly, as signs are used more frequently over time, they often change form and lose their visual resemblance to their meaning, a process that happens in spoken languages too, where the connection between a word's sound and its meaning erodes over generations.

Grammar Lives in Space

ASL grammar is expressed through the body and the space in front of the signer. Rather than adding word endings or auxiliary verbs the way English does, ASL signers establish people, places, and objects in specific locations in their signing space and refer back to those locations throughout a conversation. Facial expressions are not merely emotional, they serve as grammatical markers, indicating questions, negation, topic-comment structure, and sentence types.

How Signs Are Organized in the Mind

Researchers have built a free, interactive database called ASL-LEX that catalogs information on nearly 3,000 ASL signs, how frequently each sign is used, how iconic it is, and how visually similar it is to other signs. The database reveals how signs cluster in the mental lexicon: frequently used signs tend to be simpler and surrounded by many visually similar signs, while rare signs tend to be more isolated and complex. This mirrors patterns found in spoken languages and confirms that ASL operates through the same kind of rich mental network as any other language.

ASL Is Not a Universal Language

Each country and region has developed its own sign language. British Sign Language is entirely different from ASL, even though both countries share English as a spoken language. In Canada, both ASL and Langue des signes québécoise (LSQ) are used by Deaf Canadians, there is no single "Canadian Sign Language." There are also Indigenous sign languages in North America, including Hand Talk, which was used by Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains long before ASL existed.

ASL has also traveled widely. ASL-based sign languages are used in parts of West Africa, and ASL has influenced the sign languages of other countries, such as Filipino Sign Language, which the Philippines declared its national sign language in 2018.

Language and Belonging

For many Deaf people, ASL is not simply a way to communicate, it is a cornerstone of cultural identity and community belonging. The Deaf community has its own shared history, humor, artistic traditions, and social world, much of which is expressed through and centered on ASL. Many Deaf people use a capital "D" in "Deaf" to signal this cultural belonging, as distinct from a medical description of hearing status.

Intergenerational Transmission

One distinctive aspect of Deaf culture is how language is passed down. Approximately 90–95% of Deaf children are born to hearing parents, meaning most Deaf children first encounter ASL not at home, but at school or through Deaf peers. Residential schools for the Deaf have historically served as cultural and linguistic hubs, places where children could fully participate in a language and community designed for them.

Language Deprivation: Why Early Access Matters

Research consistently shows that Deaf children who receive early, full access to ASL develop stronger language, cognitive, and social outcomes. When Deaf children are denied access to sign language during critical early years, whether through educational policy, family choice, or lack of resources, they can experience language deprivation with lasting effects on development. The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders recommends that parents expose deaf or hard-of-hearing children to language (spoken or signed) as early as possible.

Rhythm Without Sound

When most people think of rhythm in language, they think of sound, the beat of a drum, the meter of a poem read aloud. But rhythm is pattern, flow, and repetition, and ASL has its own profound rhythmic qualities. Handshape repetition, the symmetry of two-handed signs, the arc of movement through space, and the expressive pulse of face and body all create rhythm that can be felt and seen rather than heard. These qualities make ASL a natural language for poetry, performance, and art.

ASL Poetry: A Formal Literary Tradition

There is a rich tradition of ASL poetry with its own recognized techniques and masters. ASL poets use handshape rhyme (where multiple signs in sequence share the same handshape), location patterns, movement rhyme, and visual imagery in ways that have no direct equivalent in spoken poetry. ASL poetry also employs techniques like personification, where a signer uses their own body to embody a character, object, or even a biological process, and onomatopoeia through handshape, where the physical quality of a sign mimics the rhythm or sensation it describes. For example, a signer representing a heartbeat might open and close their fist rhythmically while their hand travels along the body's path, making the rhythm visible as well as conceptual.

Two foundational figures in ASL poetry are worth knowing by name. Clayton Valli (1951–2003) was the first person to earn a doctorate in ASL poetics and the first to formally identify ASL poetry as a literary genre in its own right. His poem Dandelion uses nature imagery to speak about ASL's persistence despite oralist suppression, a poem that is itself an act of linguistic resilience. Ella Mae Lentz (born 1954), born in Berkeley to two Deaf parents, is a poet, educator, and co-author of the widely used Signing Naturally ASL curriculum. Her collection The Treasure, available on DVD in its original signed form, shows what ASL poetry looks and feels like as a performed art rather than a translated text.

Visual Vernacular: Cinema in the Body

One of the most celebrated art forms in ASL is visual vernacular, a highly condensed storytelling technique that combines signing, gesture, and physical movement to create cinematic narratives, complete with camera-like shifts in perspective. A visual vernacular performer can shift from showing a wide-angle view of a landscape to a close-up of a single detail, change perspectives between characters, compress or stretch time, all while standing in one place. It is a performance form inseparable from the body of the artist, and from the visual intelligence of ASL itself.

Dip Hop: ASL Meets Hip-Hop

In 2005, rapper Warren "Wawa" Snipe coined the term "dip hop" to describe a style of rap music rooted in both hip-hop and Deaf culture. Dip hop is a style of rap, but it stands apart from other hip-hop styles because it grows out of Deaf culture and Deaf aesthetics. Dip hop artists rap in sign language, drawing on their lived Deaf experience.

Dip hop takes many forms. Some artists work in ASL only; others combine signed and spoken language simultaneously. Some prerecord vocal tracks that play in the background while they rap in sign language. Some use specialized equipment, subwoofers, vibrating balloons, haptic vests, to make bass and rhythm physically felt by the audience. Gallaudet University and the National Technical Institute for the Deaf in Rochester have served as major cultural hubs for the development of this scene.

In 2022, Wawa and Sean Forbes made history as the first ASL performers at a Super Bowl halftime show. Forbes' EP "Little Victories" reached #1 in the hip-hop category on iTunes and made the Billboard top 200 in 2020. Finnish rapper Signmark became the first Deaf artist signed to a major record label (Warner Music Finland) in 2009.

Alongside dip hop, contemporary Deaf performance artists are expanding what ASL-based expression can look like. Mx. Antoine Hunter, a Bay Area-based African, Indigenous, Deaf, Disabled, and Two Spirit choreographer and dancer, brings ASL movement into dance and physical theatre, teaching in both Deaf and hearing communities and producing the Bay Area International Deaf Dance Festival since 2013. His work makes visible how ASL's spatial and kinetic qualities extend naturally into dance and embodied performance.

Framing Matters

On the Word "Hearing Impaired"

Many Deaf and hard-of-hearing people prefer not to be called "hearing impaired" because it frames their identity through what they lack rather than who they are. The NAD recommends using "Deaf," "hard of hearing," or "Deaf and hard of hearing" and following the individual's own preference.

Black ASL: Acknowledging Internal Diversity

Black ASL evolved as a result of racially segregated schools for the Deaf in some U.S. states. It differs from standard ASL in vocabulary, phonology, and some grammatical features, often using more two-handed signs and a wider signing space. Modern Black ASL also borrows idioms from African American English. Like all language variation, Black ASL is linguistically rich and reflects the community that created it.

Language Arts

• ASL Alphabet Book (K–2): Students create an illustrated alphabet book where each page features the ASL handshape and a word or drawing starting with that letter
• Handshape Poem (2–5): Write a short poem where every line begins with the same letter, then learn the ASL handshape and incorporate it into a signed performance, experiencing visual rhyme firsthand
• Comparative Linguistics (4–5): Compare how English and ASL express the same sentence, noting word order differences, facial grammar, and spatial reference, to deepen understanding of how grammar works across languages

Social Studies & History

• Laurent Clerc's Journey (2–5): Trace Clerc's voyage from France to Connecticut and map the spread of Deaf schools across the U.S. in the 1800s
• Language Rights Timeline (4–5): Create a timeline from Hartford (1817) to Stokoe's research (1960) to Saskatchewan's legislation (2023), connecting to broader civil rights themes
• Global ASL (3–5): Research how ASL has influenced other sign languages around the world, such as in West Africa and the Philippines, and how each country’s Deaf community developed its own sign language. Discuss how a language travels

Visual Arts & Performing Arts

• Handshape Sculpture (K–3): Using clay or playdough, students sculpt the ASL handshape for their name's first letter, then decorate it
• ASL Performance Analysis (3–5): Watch a teacher-selected clip of ASL poetry or visual vernacular; discuss what techniques the artist uses, repetition, movement, facial expression, use of space
• Signed Song (K–5): Learn a simple class song in both spoken and signed form; discuss how the experience of performing it differs between the two modalities
• Kinetic Sculpture (3–5): Inspired by Deaf theatre practices, have students work in small groups to collectively build a shape or object using only their bodies and movement, no words or signs. Discuss: How is this like sign language? How is it different?

Math & Science

• Pattern Recognition (K–2): Sort ASL handshapes into groups, by number of fingers extended, bent vs. straight, one hand vs. two, connecting to math classification and sorting
• Neuroscience Connection (4–5): Introduce the finding that the brain processes signed and spoken language in the same key language regions, using this as a jumping-off point for discussion of what "language" really is in the brain

Life Skills

• Ways We Communicate (K–2): Brainstorm all the ways humans communicate, talking, writing, signing, gesturing, drawing, music, and discuss how each has its own strengths
• Language and Belonging (3–5): Discuss how sharing a language creates community. Connect to students' own experiences with languages, dialects, or phrases that feel like a bond with family or community

Celebrating National ASL Day

Learning ASL

Deaf Culture & Community

Deaf Theatre & Performance

ASL Videos & Media for the Classroom

Books & Publishing