|
You know that "speaking" American Sign Language (ASL) is mostly a matter of using your fingers, hands, and arms. What you may not understand is that your facial expression and body language are important and sometimes crucial for understanding Signs and their meaning.
The following sections explain how you get nearly your whole body involved in ASL.
Spelling with your fingers
Signers use the manual alphabet all the time, especially beginners. People's names, at first, and some words need to be fingerspelled — spelling words using the manual alphabet (see Figure 1). So, as a beginner, feel free to fingerspell any word you don't know the Sign for. If you want to fingerspell two or more words in a row, such as a title or first and last name of someone, pause for just a second between each word.
Figure 1: The ASL alphabet.
 | Don't worry about being slow at fingerspelling. Remember, clarity is the goal, not speed. Silently mouth the letters as you fingerspell them. Doing so helps you to control your speed because you're concentrating more on the letters. |
Some initializations — concepts such as a.m. and p.m. — are signed as morning and evening, respectively, rather than fingerspelled. But a word like okay can be fingerspelled as O-K, or you can just show the F handshape.
A.M.
P.M.
Shaping up those hands
Remembering a few simple points can help you make handshapes like a lifelong Signer. Handshapes are hand formations used to sign each letter of the alphabet.
For Signing purposes, the hand you write with is called your dominant hand (some folks call it the active hand). The other hand is your base hand or passive hand. Here, all of the illustrations represent a right-handed Signer. So the right hand illustrates the dominant hand, and the left hand illustrates the passive hand.
While the active hand does the work, the passive hand does one of the following:
- Displays one of seven basic handshapes, called natural handshapes
The seven natural handshapes are the letters A, B, C, S, and O, as well as the numbers 1 and 5.
Natural handshapes can be used in a variety of ways — the same handshape may move for a particular Sign but not another, or the same handshape may be formed in one direction for a particular Sign but formed in a different direction for another. For one Sign, such as start, the natural handshape (in this case, the number 5) forms in one direction. But in another Sign, such as cook, that same natural handshape is formed in a different direction. Check out the following examples of active/passive handshapes used while signing:
START: Place your active index finger between your index and middle fingers of your passive hand, and then turn the active index finger outward — it looks like you're turning the ignition key of a car.
BUY: Hold out your passive hand, palm up in the 5 handshape. Use your active hand as you would to hand money to a salesclerk.
COOK: Hold your passive hand out, palm up. Lay your active hand across the top of it, palm down. Now flip your active hand over, palm up, then flip it back over, palm down.
When the passive hand mimics or mirrors the shape of the dominant hand, both hands either move together or alternately. If moving alternately, you move both hands in alternate directions at the same time. Examples of alternating handshapes include the following:
BOOK: Make this Sign as if you're actually opening a book.
GIFT: Both hands in front of you in the "X" handshape, but one is extended a little farther away than the other from your body. At the same time, jerk your hand up a little bit, twice.
MAYBE
STORE: Keep your hands in the same shape and move them back and forth simultaneously.
Benefiting with body language
Communicating a concept in Sign is often made clear by using body language. The meaning of "I don't know" comes through clearly when you raise your shoulders, tilt your head, and turn your palm up. Signing "I'm sick" is more easily understood when you accompany the Sign with half-shut eyes, open mouth, and a partially extended tongue. Another example is the word no. The speed at which you shake your head from side to side, with eyes open or shut, can say a lot about the degree of "no." Check out the illustrations of these Signs to see what we mean.
DON'T KNOW
SICK: Both hands move in a small circular motion.
NO: When you sign a word, close your eyes if you want to make it more emphatic.
Telling with your face
In Sign, you use your face to show emotion and add expression. Facial expression tells you what type of sentence is being signed and how the Signer feels about the information. Your facial expression is just as important as what your hands are doing. Sign these expressions as if you actually "feel" that way. For example, you sign the word sad while you slump your shoulders down and make a sad facial expression. You sign happy just the opposite — keep your shoulders up and wear a smile.
| Be sure that you maintain eye contact when you're signing, and watch your conversational partner's face, not his or her hands. Your peripheral vision allows you to still see the hands, so don't worry about missing any Signs. |
| 
