Teach In Sign Language

Getting Started With Sign Language Instruction

Teach In Sign Language is a resource that bundles curriculum materials, video references, and exercise sheets for people who want to start teaching ASL at home or in informal group settings. It targets instructors who don't have a linguistics degree but need something structured enough to not wing a lesson and lose half the class. The package isn't professional-grade academic material, but it covers the basics well enough for community college continuing-ed courses, church groups, and small private tutoring. The main download includes a PDF curriculum guide broken into twelve units, a separate worksheet packet with about sixty pages of practice drills, and a folder of reference cards showing hand shapes with phonetic descriptors. There are also video clips on a companion site, though most of them are static shots of instructors demonstrating from the shoulders up, which is fine for beginners but useless if you need to see fingerspelling close-up. The total package takes up roughly 400 megabytes. The files are organized by week, so you can skip ahead or drag the order around if your students need more time on a particular topic. One thing most people miss when they first open the package is that the hand-shape reference cards use the SIL International classification system rather than the standard NAD conventions. That doesn't break anything, but it means the labels won't match what your students will see on other resources. I ran into this exact problem when a student brought in a textbook from a university program and we couldn't align our worksheets because my hand-shape names and her book's names were systematically different. The workaround was straightforward: I made a two-column glossary document mapping each SIL term to its NAD equivalent and printed it as the first page of every packet going forward. Takes about ten minutes to set up the first time.

How to Use This Resource Without Wasting Everyone's Time

The curriculum assumes you're teaching one unit per week over twelve weeks. Each unit has a vocabulary list of around twenty-five signs, a grammar point, and a review exercise. The vocabulary lists are the weakest part of the whole package. They group signs alphabetically by gloss translation rather than by thematic relevance or frequency of use. Teaching the signs for refrigerator, stove, and microwave in one session alongside bathroom and bedroom makes no cognitive sense for anyone learning this for the first time. The signs in those categories share almost no visual-motor overlap, so the retention rate drops significantly compared to theming the lessons around kitchen versus rooms of the house. I reorganized the first six units myself by pulling vocabulary into thematic clusters and leaving the grammar progression largely intact. The grammar sequences are actually decent. They introduce classifier predicates, non-manual markers, and role-shifting in an order that matches how deaf native speakers actually process these structures. That part is worth keeping. If you follow the original unit order without tweaking, you'll end up spending three sessions on vocabulary that has no logical connection between them, which is a common beginner mistake that kills momentum in the first month. The reference cards are useful but not sufficient. A lot of people treat them as a substitute for watching fluent signers produce the signs dynamically. That doesn't work. Static cards can't show you the movement path of a sign, the facial grammar that accompanies it, or the distinction between a sign produced in idle space versus a sign anchored to the body. I recommend pairing every reference card with at least two video examples from the Gloss or Lifeprint archives before you ever show that sign to a student. The extra ten minutes per sign pays off immediately because students stop developing motor patterns that will be wrong from day one.

Common Mistakes When Using Teach In Sign Language

The biggest issue I see is people skipping the pronunciation notes. Every sign has a handshape, location, movement, orientation, and non-manual component. The curriculum calls this the five parameters. Most new instructors focus entirely on handshape and movement and completely ignore location and orientation, which turns distinct signs into homophones. The signs for MOTHER and MATERNITY use the same handshape and movement but differ entirely in location. If your students can't distinguish them in production, they can't distinguish them in comprehension either. I had a student produce both signs from the chin instead of differentiating between forehead and chin locations, and she couldn't understand why native signers kept looking confused when she signed it. We spent two weeks drilling location alone before the issue resolved. Another issue is over-relying on the vocabulary lists without building sentence frames. You can learn fifty signs and still not be able to say anything useful because you haven't practiced combining them into grammatical structures. The curriculum does include sentence patterns, but they're buried inside the review sections rather than presented upfront. Move the grammar frames to the beginning of each unit so students know what they're building toward before they memorize isolated signs. This usually cuts practice time in half and improves retention by maybe thirty percent based on what I've tracked across four different groups.

What This Resource Can't Do For You

Teach In Sign Language doesn't include any assessment tools beyond basic review quizzes. If you're running a formal class and need to grade students, you'll have to build your own rubrics. The package also doesn't cover cultural content, which is a real gap. Sign language instruction without Deaf culture is incomplete, and this curriculum touches on it barely at all. You'll need supplemental material on Deaf history, communication ethics, and community norms if you want your students to function in actual Deaf spaces. The video clips on the companion site are another weak spot. They're recorded on low-resolution webcams with poor lighting, and several of them have the instructor signing too fast for a beginner to follow. I've seen entire classes struggle through a single clip because the production quality made it impossible to track finger movements. I stopped using those videos altogether after the first month and switched to archived footage from the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, which has cleaner, slower instructional content. Your students will thank you for it. The download link is hosted on the Teach In Sign Language website under the resources tab. The file is around 400 megabytes and requires about fifteen minutes to unpack on a standard laptop. There's no activation key or account requirement, which is unusual for educational software these days and honestly makes it more trustworthy. You get what you pay for, and in this case the price is modest enough that the return on investment is reasonable if you put in the effort to reorganize the materials rather than using them raw out of the box.

I've used this package with three separate cohorts now, and the ones where I restructured the vocabulary thematically and supplemented with proper video references had noticeably better outcomes in both sign accuracy and grammatical comprehension. The ones where I followed the original layout exactly performed worse across every metric I tracked. The difference came down to curriculum organization, not the quality of the core material itself. That's probably the most important thing to understand before you start.