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

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Page Within days of his arrival at Gallaudet, Bill Stokoe was introduced to his next research projectone that would last for the rest of his life. He began lessons in what everyone then called "the sign language" These lessons marked the beginning of a lifetime of learning, analyzing, and promoting a language that was still considered by many to be a convenient but inadequate system of communicationalmost a necessary evil.
Although the oralists had determined that all signing should be banned in favor of speech and lipreading, sign language had never been completely eliminated in the United States. Many deaf people signed among themselves, of course, but signing was also tolerated in deaf schools and used by staff, not only with children who had been labeled "oral failures" but in various other contexts as well. In an essay outlining the history of the use of American Sign Language, Mimi WheiPing Lou explains:
Not surprisingly, religious groups and clergy had already recognized the difficulty of communicating with the Deaf through oral-only methods. Thus, in the s clergy began learning sign language, and religious groups began to goon record as supporting the use of sign language. An interesting situation developed at some schools . . . where teachers were required to use the oral method but clergy were permitted to use sign language. By the s an increasing number of seminaries were offering sign language to those who would be working with the Deaf community . . . . When communication was a means to some other end, . . . then sign language was accepted and used. When a particular communication systemthat is, Englishwas itself the goal of education, then manual approaches were avoided, if not completely banned" However, the "signing" that hearing instructors used to teach deaf students in these schools was actually a system of manually coded English. Lou Fant, a Gallaudet professor whose parents were deaf, explains that during the 1950s
There were few classes in sign language. Gallaudet had a class for those graduate students studying to become schoolteachers. A few schools for deaf children had "survival" classes

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