Cover next page > title: Seeing Language in Sign : The Work of William C. Stokoe author

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Page Linguistics Panel, I believe that more research was funded on ASL than any other language save English. Gallaudet and Salk were clearly the foci of this nationwide movement of scholarship . . . which spread worldwide" Most of the people who have been influential in promoting the recognition and use of American Sign Language during the past forty years and who have published major works in the field either worked in the LRL or maintained close contact with it.
Among these are Charlotte Baker-Shenk, whose descriptions of the nonmanual aspects of signing replaced the impressionistic notions that had previously been accepted, and Dennis Cokely, whose dissertation, "Toward A Sociolinguistic Model of the
Interpreting Process" is still used in interpreter training and whose five-volume textbook, written with Baker-Shenk, offers a spiraling curriculum for teachers and students of American Sign Language. Today Baker-Shenk works as an advocate for deaf people in Washington, DC, and Cokely is president of Sign Media, Inc, which produces videotapes for ASL instruction. Then there's Robbin Battison, whose dissertation, "Lexical Borrowing in American Sign Language" demonstrated that a language without sound can have a phonology. Others are Laura Pettito, whose research with deaf infants "babbling" in sign has received worldwide publicity Carol Padden, who with her husband, Tom Humphries, has become a leading spokesperson for the rights of deaf people and the importance of recognizing them as a distinct cultural and linguistic group James Woodward, whose anthropological work, especially writings such as How You Gonna Get to Heaven if You Can't Talk with Jesus, refute the pathological and medical models of deafness that have informed and directed so many traditional policies in deaf education;
Harry Markowicz, who with Bernard Mottez coedited a French newsletter about sign language research and who studies the problems of deaf people as an ethnic group Carol Erting, a Gallaudet scholar and researcher known for her work with the parents of deaf infants and M. J. Bienvenu, who codirected the Bicultural Center, an organization (now closed) that advocated for the bilingual/bicultural approach in the education of deaf children.
These scholars and researchers did not simply work for Bill

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