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

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Page start, Bill Stokoe was an exception to the rule. He stepped outside the assumptions of his day to discover the differences between American Sign Language and the signed English that teachers of the deaf were usingif they used any signs at all.
Stokoe realized that his deaf students must possess high intelligence to be accepted into Gallaudet despite having never been taught in the sign with which they were most familiar and comfortabletheir own language. He realized that deaf people were perfectly capable of learning, that the problem they faced was not lack of intelligence but a language barrier. Only when real communication between deaf and hearing people became possible would deaf students arriving at Gallaudet, or any university,
be prepared to understand Chaucer or any other college text. As Bill Stokoe wrote more than twenty-five years later, "The teacher who learns signs and puts them into English phrases and sentences to teach Deaf pupils will fail to communicate, unless pupils already have mastered the sentence-forming and the word-forming systems of Englisha most unlikely chance. Just seeing signs that someone thinks stand for English words is by no means the same as learning the word-systems of English" Bill Stokoe was coming to a realization that there was a relationship between his students' language and their performance. He saw that their signs "were not simply slang that when they were combined in certain ways, they expressed meanings more completely and in a more complex way than single signs or words."
In the middle of his second year at Gallaudet, Stokoe talked to Detmold about his observations:
I remember telling George I thought there was much more to what the students and deaf members of the faculty were doing than just putting English words into signs or fingerspelling. I told him, it looks tome that they've got areal language here. Of course, I had been reading Outline of English Structure [by George L. Trager and Henry Lee Smith,
Jr.], and I was thoroughly convinced of the rightness of their underlying premises that culture is a system, a seamless web of a system, and that language is one of the subsystems within it.

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