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

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Page for new teachers to help save them from being completely lost, and a few classes thrived in church basements. None of these classes taught ASL American Sign Language, but rather taught a system of manually coded English.
Like most children of deaf parents, I grew up with no conscious awareness that ASL was a language. I thought of ASL as an ungrammatical parody of English. Bill Stokoe was introduced to signing for the first time in one of those "survival" classes at Gallaudet. In the morning he studied with Elizabeth Benson, dean of women and the daughter of deaf parents his afternoon teacher was Dick Phillips, a deaf professor who was also dean of men.
Stokoe quickly realized that the signs he was being taught were very different from the signs his students were using, and he realized, as well, the difficulty his students would have in understanding his halting, stiff signing. Elizabeth Benson, he recalls,
was "teaching sign translation of English, or a literal, sign-for-word translation of English" In addition, she insisted that he and the other new professors "spend a lot of time just learning to fingerspell" because she was "very sure that the teachers should comport themselves in language as well as behavior as befitted teachers in an institution of higher education" This was the first of many times Stokoe was told that the signs the students used among themselves were "inappropriate" for 'formal" situations.
I realized immediately that the deaf students on campus were not using signs the same way that we were. Even though the signs represented the same word, the students performed them differently. We were to avoid slang, as Elizabeth Benson called itin other words, we were to avoid the language the students used.
Some years later, I observed Miss Benson giving a class in communication to health workers, nurses, and social workers,
people who would not be teaching deaf students formally in classes but working with deaf people. She was teaching them facial expression. She told them to use pantomime or whatever they needed to communicate. It was just the opposite,
really, of what she taught us to do in classes.

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