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

< previous page
page_44
next page >
Page I received about three weeks of that kind of instruction, and then we were on our own in the classes. We were supposed to speak and sign at the same time. We didn't have interpreters. We proceeded slowly and roughly, and the students were often tolerant enough to help us when we needed a signor to stop us when what we had done wasn't clear. It must have been horrible, but we got through it somehow. I wondered whether I really ever would learn to interact thoroughly enough with the students to be of any positive value. Before he taught his first class at Gallaudet, Stokoe realized that he wasn't going to achieve his goals of teaching his students to read and write English well and to develop an appreciation of English literature unless he learned their language. He recalls two experiences, both involving deaf professors, that helped him to understand the crucial relationship between communication and teaching. The first was with Carl G. Croneberg, an English professor with whom Stokoe would later collaborate on A Dictionary
of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles.
Carl had a student come in with a paper that contained the word "backlog" and the student didn't know what the word meant he had never encountered it before. Carl started to explain it to him in signing and in fingerspelling, and the student suddenly signed "understand" The student then made a sign which, literally translated, meant 'have behind" Once the student had grasped the idea, he almost automatically came outwith its expression in ASL.
It was in the classroom of another deaf professor, Robert Panara, that Stokoe first saw sign language used effectively to teach.
The experience, he recalls, was areal eyeopener . . . . [Panara] was the best lecturer in sign language going. During the class, he was discussing the novel Wuthering Heights. What was fascinating about his performance was that he used one hand to talk about Heathcliff,
spelling the name at first with that hand, then just using the letter H on that hand. Then he used the other hand to represent the name Cathy, again fingerspelled at first. That C became the hand for talking about, signing about, what

Download 2.48 Mb.

Share with your friends: