Personal narratives are one way people code their experiences and convey them to others. Given that speakers can simultaneously express information and define a social situation, analyzing how and why people structure the telling of personal narratives can provide insight into the social dimensions of language use. In Extraordinary from the Ordinary: Personal Experience Narratives in American Sign Language, Kristin Jean Mulrooney shows that accounts by Deaf persons expressed in ASL possess the same characteristics and perform the same function as oral personal narratives.

Mulrooney analyses12 personal narratives by ASL signers to determine how they “tell”  their stories. She examines the ASL form of textual narration to see how signers use lexical signs to grammatically encode information, and how they also convey perceived narration. In perceived narration, the presenter depicts a past occurrence in the immediate environment that allows the audience to partially witness and interpret the event. Mulrooney determined that ASL narratives reveal a patterned structure consisting of an introduction, a main events section for identifying and describing past events, and a conclusion. They also can include background information, an explication section in which the presenter expands or clarifies an event, and a section that allows the presenter to explain his or her feelings about what happened. Liberally illustrated with photographs from videotaped narratives, Extraordinary from the Ordinary offers an engrossing, expansive view of personal narratives embodying the unique linguistic elements of ASL.

Completely reorganized to reflect the growing intricacy of the study of ASL linguistics, the 5th edition presents 26 units in seven parts. Part One: Introduction presents a revision of Defining Language and an entirely new unit, Defining Linguistics. Part Two: Phonology has been completely updated with new terminology and examples. The third part, Morphology, features units on building new signs, deriving nouns from verbs, compounds, fingerspelling, and numeral incorporation. Part Four: Syntax includes units on basic sentence types, lexical categories, word order, time and aspect, verbs, and the function of space. The fifth part, Semantics, offers updates on the meanings of individual signs and sentences.

Part Six: Language in Use showcases an entirely new section on Black ASL in the unit on Variation and Historical Change. The units on bilingualism and language and ASL discourse have been thoroughly revised and updated, and the Language as Art unit has been enhanced with a new section on ASL in film. Two new readings update Part Seven, and all text illustrations have been replaced by video stills from the expanded video content. Also, signs described only with written explanations in past editions now have both photographic samples in the text and full demonstrations in the video.

You can find the supplemental video content on the Gallaudet University Press YouTube channel.
 

A new initiative known as the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) strives to improve education today by methodically examining and assessing the vital component of classroom interaction. This collection presents research by five professors who adopted SoTL methodology to study their own classrooms at Gallaudet University, a uniquely diverse bilingual institution that employs both American Sign Language (ASL) and written English. The Gallaudet study, called the GSTLI, intended to create an engaged learning community that investigated, reflected upon, and documented strategies that most effectively enhance learning for linguistically diverse, visually oriented populations.

     After extensive SoTL training, the GSTLI professors reviewed interaction in their respective classrooms. Through meticulous study of class videos and written assignments in three General Studies Requirements courses for first-year students, the teachers learned how to ensure connecting with students who have a variety of language differences and communication methods.

     The other professors assessed bottlenecks in classes on the linguistic structure of ASL, and on criminal justice. The linguistics professor identified the bottleneck as the students’ inability to conceptualize the interrelationship between definitions and examples, a fundamental skill to scientific thinking. In the criminal justice class, the professor saw the need to guide students through linguistic bottlenecks by providing materials in both ASL and English. The successes of the GSTLI presented in this unique volume can benefit other teachers by better preparing them to meet the needs of bilingual diverse learners in more effective ways.