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

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Stokoe; they worked with him as part of a group of people who contributed to one another's knowledge and together changed the way that both deaf and hearing people perceived American Sign Language. Bill Stokoe was the catalyst for this group his prestige brought in outside funding while the group laid the foundation for what eventually would be known as "the deaf culture movement" Nowhere was Stokoe's ability to recognize people's talents more evident than in the case of Judy Williams, a deaf graduate student and mother of two deaf children. As soon as Williams received her master's degree from Gallaudet in 1968, Stokoe convinced Dean Schuchman to let him hire her to teach prep classes in the English Department. At the same time, Williams enrolled her two children in the Kendall Nursery School on campus. Stokoe recalls that she turned the place around. The hearing mothers saw how Judy's children not only responded to her instructions but could communicate with each other and with the deaf people going along the corridors. The other mothers would ask,
"What's going on here These kids are oceans ahead of ours" Theirs, of course, were receiving auditory training noises in their earphones, pictures, attempts to teach them reading and speech, making sounds, holding their fingers on the teacher's throat. And to give the teachers credit, they listened. Judy pointed out that she was using sign language at home to communicate with her children. That nursery school began using sign language practically overnight.
Later, Judy Williams was one of the first to join me in the lab. . . . She made some incredible tapes of her daughter
Tiffany at three and a half. Tiffany would address her father in American Sign Language, then Judy would ask her what she had said. Tiffany, who used signed English in the nursery school where her mother taught and read books in English with her mother at home, would code switch and address her mother in signs that were very close to English order. Judy wrote a wonderful essay about this, which I published in Sign Language Studies and later republished in Sign and Culture.

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