David BolesArm Angles in American Sign Language: The Textbook That Teaches What Other Textbooks Ignore
Watch any native signer and then watch an intermediate student. The difference is not in the handshapes. It is not in the facial expressions, though those matter. The difference lives in the arms. The native signer’s shoulders engage when emphasis requires it. The elbows extend and contract with meaning. The signing space expands for formal address and contracts for intimacy. The student, trained to focus on hands and face, moves through space as if the arms were merely transportation for the fingers. This is the gap that Arm Angles in American Sign Language addresses. It is the textbook we wished existed twenty years ago.
Most ASL instruction concentrates on the parameters everyone agrees matter: handshape, location, movement, palm orientation, non-manual markers. These are the building blocks, the phonological primitives that distinguish one sign from another. What gets lost in this necessary attention to fundamentals is the architecture that supports everything else. The arm is not merely a delivery system for the hand. It is an articulator in its own right, and its positioning carries semantic weight that affects meaning, register, and comprehension in ways that intermediate and advanced learners rarely understand explicitly.
ASL Linguistics SeriesConsider the sign UNDERSTAND. In citation form, the index finger flicks upward near the forehead with a wrist movement. The arm positions the hand, but the movement itself is distal, located at the wrist and fingers. Now consider the same sign in emphatic use: the forearm moves, the signing space expands, the shoulder engages. The handshape has not changed. The location has not changed. What has changed is proximal articulation, the engagement of shoulder and elbow and upper arm in the production. That engagement signals emphasis, formality, certainty. Reduce the arm involvement further than citation form and the sign reads as casual, rapid, intimate. The same lexical item carries different pragmatic meaning depending on how the arm participates.
This is what we mean by proximal articulation, and this is what the textbook examines across twelve chapters and comprehensive supplementary materials.
The Collaboration
Janna Sweenie has taught American Sign Language at New York University for over thirty-five years. She created the ASL 5 course for the NYU minor, served as Program Coordinator from 2017 to 2020, and has worked as a consultant for Microsoft, Google, and New York City museums. She is a two-time recipient of the NYU Steinhardt School Administrator Award. She was born Deaf in Council Bluffs, Iowa, and graduated from the Iowa School for the Deaf. For eighteen years she has served as a Vocational Rehabilitation Counselor for the Deaf in the State of New York Department of Education.
David Boles has taught American Sign Language at NYU and other institutions for over two decades. He holds an MFA from Columbia University and founded David Boles Books Writing and Publishing in 1975. His background in dramatic literature informs the textbook’s attention to register, performance, and the expressive possibilities of signed discourse.
Together we have written Hand Jive: American Sign Language for Real Life, Picture Yourself Learning American Sign Language, Level 1, Day One: Learning American Sign Language in 24 Hours, Hardcore ASL Textbook for Levels 1-7, and American Sign Language Level 5. Our work spans beginning to advanced instruction, print and video, classroom and self-study. What we have not done until now is write the book that addresses what we kept having to explain in person: why the arms matter, how they function, and what happens when you get them wrong.
What the Textbook Contains
The book opens with anatomy. Not because anatomy is inherently interesting, though it is, but because understanding the skeletal framework, joint system, and muscular apparatus of the signing arm clarifies everything that follows. Why can the shoulder rotate in ways the elbow cannot? Why do certain sign movements fatigue the arm while others remain sustainable? What does neutral position mean anatomically, and why does departure from neutral carry meaning?
From there the textbook moves through the three spatial dimensions of signing space: vertical (height carries semantic information distinguishing verb tenses and marking formality), horizontal (enabling reference establishment and tracking), and sagittal (the temporal plane that maps time onto space, with forward movement indicating future and backward movement indicating past). Each dimension involves arm positioning. Each dimension affects meaning in ways that isolated attention to handshapes cannot capture.
The core theoretical concept is the proximal/distal distinction. Signs produced with more proximal involvement, engaging the shoulder and upper arm as primary articulators, tend to read as more emphatic, more formal, more careful, more public. Signs produced with more distal involvement, wrist and finger movements, tend to read as more casual, more rapid, more intimate, more efficient. This is not absolute. Sign-specific conventions override general tendencies. But the correlation provides a heuristic that helps learners understand how arm engagement affects the social and pragmatic meaning of what they sign.
Subsequent chapters address classifier predicates and arm-as-referent, two-handed coordination and symmetry constraints, elbow mechanics and sign modification, non-manual marker integration with arm positioning, biomechanics and signing health, acquisition and pedagogy, and variation across dialect, generation, and individual style. The final chapter considers future directions in ASL research, including technological developments in sign language recognition and the evolving landscape of ASL instruction.
For Whom This Book Is Written
This is not a beginning textbook. Readers should have completed at least intermediate ASL coursework or possess equivalent proficiency. The book assumes familiarity with basic phonology, parametric structure, and glossing conventions. It is written for advanced students preparing for interpreter certification, working interpreters seeking to refine their skills, ASL instructors developing curriculum for upper-level courses, Deaf education professionals, and researchers in sign language linguistics. It is also appropriate for mature signers who want to understand the theoretical foundations of what they do intuitively.
The supplementary materials include a comprehensive glossary, notation guide for representing arm angles in written form, practical exercises for each chapter progressing from observation to production, self-assessment checklists, and additional resources pointing to video materials and research literature. Instructor materials include lesson plans, syllabus templates, frequently asked questions, observation guides, and assessment rubrics. The book is designed for both independent learners and classroom adoption.
The Problem This Book Addresses
ASL instruction in the United States has improved dramatically over the past four decades. Recognition of ASL as a legitimate language with its own grammar and syntax, rather than a simplified gestural system for the hearing impaired, has transformed both research and pedagogy. Yet instructional materials continue to treat arm positioning as secondary, intuitive, something that will come naturally with exposure. It does come naturally for some learners. For others it does not, and they plateau at a level of competence that never quite reads as fluent even though their vocabulary and grammar are technically correct.
The plateau is not a vocabulary problem. It is not a grammar problem. It is a register problem, a prosodic problem, a spatial problem that lives in the arms. The signer who never learns to modulate proximal and distal articulation across contexts will sign like someone reading aloud from a phrasebook: comprehensible but mechanical, correct but not native. This textbook addresses that gap directly, providing the explicit instruction and theoretical framework that allows learners to understand what they need to practice and why it matters.
Getting the Book
Arm Angles in American Sign Language: A Study of Proximal Articulation in Signed Discourse is available now as a Kindle edition for $14.99 at Amazon and paperback version for $19.99. A free PDF is available at David Boles Books for those who prefer that format or who want to evaluate the textbook before classroom adoption. Additional materials are available at HardcoreASL.com.
The arms have always mattered. Now there is a textbook that explains why, that teaches how, and that gives learners and instructors the tools they need to address what other materials ignore. This is the book we wished we had when we started teaching. We are glad to finally offer it to everyone else.
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David Boles