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

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Page a threatened species of language, if only because of their own difficulty in finding suitable informants, in getting credit for their sign language as a working language in graduate studies, and in getting academic encouragement and support for their study of a still largely unrecognized language. It was business as usual when Stokoe returned from sabbatical. His fame had spread throughout the world, but in the world's only liberal arts college for the deaf his findings were still ignored.
By 1979 Stokoe's work had begun to attract favorable attention in the popular press. The Washington Post published a two-page article about him together with a particularly striking photograph, in which Stokoe signs while standing before the enormous bronze sculpture of TH. Gallaudet opposite Chapel Hall on the Gallaudet campus. The sculpture represents Gallaudet teaching
Alice Cogswell how to sign the letter A. The symbolism couldn't be more fitting It was TH. Gallaudet who brought the use of sign language for instruction to America, and it was Bill Stokoe who would bring it back again to occupy its rightful place in the education of deaf people.
Stokoe was also becoming better known among deaf professionals infields other than ASL research, such as education and the legal rights of deaf people. Many of these people were graduates of Gallaudet and had known Stokoe there. They met him at conferences and workshops, visited his lab, and corresponded with him he published their papers in Sign Language Studies. The original skepticism among deaf people toward a hearing man's "examining" their method of communication had given way to respect and appreciation for his scholarship and for the recognition he brought to their language. As Merv Garretson says, "We were all surprised by it we never thought it would amount to anything. Now he's a folk hero Harlan Lane equates Bill
Stokoe's influence in the United States with that of the nineteenth-century Frenchman RA. Bebian, a friend of Laurent Clerc,
who "had great admiration for deaf people and their language, recognized their oppression, and labored mightily, in part through books, articles, and a journal he edited, to improve the appreciation of deaf language and culture.''27

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