Customer Reviews:
 Helps beginners understand signs can be "different" without being "wrong" December 10, 2006
This book is an excellent teaching tool for Sign Language instructors to help amplify the point that there is variation in Sign Language just as there is in any other language. Beginning students latch onto the notion that their first instructor signed every sign in perfect "citation" form (or the first way they saw a sign formed in a book or on a video), but every pair of hands make a sign look slightly different. And regional variations make signs vary drastically along all four parameters, yet many, many variations are still "acceptable" amongst fluent signers. This rigid thinking of the beginner is not unique to Sign Language students; in Spanish 101, students are equally confused by a substitute teacher whose accent is from a different country of origin and whose word choices might be influenced by that variation in cultural background. It's so much easier to learn, in the beginning, if everything just stays the same. Unfortunately, language doesn't work that way, any language, Sign Language included. And "Signs Across America" provides instructors of Sign Language a fun way to show beginning students abundant examples of all the variations they might encounter, not to scare them away, but to prepare them for that possibility.
 Interesting but not useful July 26, 2000
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
This book is an attempt to document the extent of regional variations of sign language throughout the United States. It is >not< a how-to book to help beginning signers learn local vocabulary. The authors are native signers who contacted friends in other areas of the country to ask for contributions. The signs covered were those the authors suspected to have the most regional variations, based on their own travels. Native signers, especially older ones, were sought out, and signs that have entered the language more recently were excluded, even if they are now the most widely understood. Signs are identified by the states from which they were collected, but not the metropolitan areas, which further limits its usefulness (for instance, Pennsylvania has 5 signs for "football" listed. Which do they use in Philadelphia?) This book would probably be entertaining to people interested in the history of ASL, but wasn't much help to me as a beginner. I also found some of the pictures hard to interpret, even when I already knew the sign.
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