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Page instance, when she asked her students who was the author of The Red and the Black, she signed "who" with the finger at the mouth while she fingerspelled "was" I don't remember whether she fingerspelled "the" and "writer' She signed "write" and then made the body sign. "Red" and "black" were signed. Then with her finger she made a little question mark at the end. That was precisely the way I had been taught by Miss Benson to ask a question in signed English.
I looked at the teacher's signing and said, "You know, to a deaf student, you haven't asked a question at all. What you did is make a series of word signs and letter signs and then you dropped your hands as soon as you were finished. That is the way a declarative sentence ends in sign language. A person who relies on vision to know what's going on watches the face more than the hands. If you want to ask a question, when the signing is finished, keep the gaze straight, eye to eye, and the hands up, not right in front of the eyes but up high almost to neck level that is the sign of a question. That pose is held fora split second. Any deaf person who knows sign language perceives that a question has been asked and that an answer is expected.
"On the other hand, when a teacher puts a question in English question-order and drops the hands and the gaze at the end of the performance, the student has been sent the signal 'I have just finished a sentence and am about to begin another.'
No wonder you weren't getting any answers to your questionyou hadn't asked a question."
That's the kind of thing our students had to put up with. I had just begun to discover the difference between a declarative sentence in sign language and an interrogative sentence. But these people had been therefor years and years, and all they could or would do was make that little question mark sign at the end of their rambling, and they'd think that the students were too lazy or stupid or unmotivated to understand them. I had perceived that most of the syntactic signals of the students' sign language came from the face, head, and eye action, and not from the handsbut these teachers had perceived nothing but hearing loss and mental deficit and language deficit and all the rest of it. 11

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