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

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Stokoe's incredulity at the teacher's inability to communicate with her deaf students is understandable. But making a statement in public that had to be embarrassing to a teacher who had been at Gallaudet for many years could not have endeared him to that teacher, or to other faculty members, for that matter. Although it indicated passionate dedication, this kind of behavior, coupled with his friendship with George Detmold, alienated Stokoe's colleagues. Stokoe became convinced years later that he had been forced out of the chairmanship of the English Department because his colleagues misunderstood or disapproved of his research.
But his unpopularity undoubtedly had something to do with his tendency to take a stand wherever and whenever he thought he was right, no matter what the consequences.
From to 1960, in addition to teaching, Stokoe again became the researcher. He studied the writings of the Abbé de l'Épée and other eighteenth-century French educators of the deaf. He admired their "open minds and boundless charity" but he came to believe that the basis of Épée's success was "an amazingly acute grasp of linguistic facts" Unlike other deaf educators of that period who taught "through articulatory exercises, ordinary writing, and a set of manual symbols corresponding to the letters of the alphabet" Épée relegated speech to a minor part of his program. 12 In Sign Language Structure, Stokoe expressed his admiration for Épée:
The difference between Épée and all his predecessors as well as many who followed him is his open-minded recognition of the structure of the problem. He could see his own language objectively and analyze its grammar in away which made possible its transmission to and synthesis in the mind of a bright teenage, congenitally deaf pupil in two years. He could also seethe mind of a pupil as a human mechanism functioning by means of a language, without being alarmed at the fact that until the education was complete that language was not French. His detractors seem to have treated pupils as automata into which the French languagethat is, its pronunciation and orthographycould be built with the aid of suitable coding devices.
Épée was the first to attempt to learn sign language, use it,

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