Best known as the Green Books, the American Sign Language books provide teachers and students of American Sign Language (ASL) with the complete means for learning about the culture, community, and the native language of Deaf people. A group of 15 ASL teachers and linguists reviewed all five books to ensure that they were accurate and easy to comprehend. This volume of the American Sign Language series explains in depth the grammar and structure of ASL while also presenting a description of the Deaf community in the United States. Written for teachers with minimal training in linguistics, it includes many illustrations, examples, and dialogues that also focus on specific aspects of the Deaf community.

In this book, the authors present current research in the study of sign language. The opening paper concentrates on content structure in an example of formal Kenyan Sign Language discourse: a sermon. The main discussion point is grammatical cohesion, or how content is structured through textual features that link episodes together in discourse. The paper analyzes this through references, substitutions, ellipses, discourse markers, and conjunctions. The authors also discuss a study focusing on a computer-based adaptive test of American Sign Language ability known as the American Sign Language Discrimination Test developed at the Rochester Institute of Technology's National Technical Institute for the Deaf. This test measures the propensity for discerning phonological and morphophonogical contrasts in American Sign Language. In this study, the American Sign Language Discrimination Test, or ASL-DT, item pool was expanded to enhance the efficiency of the test along a wider range of abilities, with the objective of offering supplementary evidence of the tests legitimacy. Later, a study is presented on the impact of familiarity and the use of American Sign Language in deaf humans conversational behaviors in order to support the current research expressing difference in conversational register in response to different types of partners. Additionally, the research offers proof of linguistic aspects of American Sign Language that are similar to spoken languages. Lastly, a study is presented on the Direct Experience Method, a method of teaching sign language with visual support, in an effort to help teachers understand the benefits of using a small amounts of students native language in second language classrooms.

This publication aims to support the effort to create transformative changes within Deaf education teacher training programs in the United States and Canada. It is a critical time to reexamine these programs and ensure the provision of the highest quality education to prepare future teachers to meet the needs of Deaf students in today's increasingly multilingual and multimodal climate. Deaf education teacher preparation programs need to understand the multiple and intersecting identities of their students to be able to provide education that is equitable for all. Programs that approach Deaf education through a multilingual lens are in a better position to produce teachers who are knowledgeable about the diverse language and cultural needs of Deaf students. The guidelines set forth in this volume can be used to help develop new undergraduate and graduate teacher training programs or to transition an existing program. The key goals and anticipated outcomes of this volume are: to increase the number of multilingual Deaf education teacher preparation programs; to increase the number of fluent language and cultural models for Deaf children in varying educational environments; to increase the number of high quality teachers with competencies in multilingual strategies; to increase collaboration between teacher training programs; and to increase research and professional development focused in multilingual pedagogies.