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

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Page completed in 1979 by Marmor and Pettito had shown clearly the inadequacy of Sim Com Marmor and Pettito concluded that,
"given the difficulty that most hearing people encounter in trying to use simultaneous communication, it is not surprising that . . there is a great deal of deletion and miscommunication which occurs among users of these artificial codes" At about the time Gallaudet adopted Sim Com, Stokoe delivered a lecture in Newcastle, England, explaining the disadvantages of Sim Com and the advantages of "actual sign language discourse" (ASL. In the lecture he described an application of ASL he had seen recently at the first National Symposium on Sign Language Research and Teaching, held in Chicago:
Instead of simultaneous interpretationwhich is, after all, only the representation of the English being spoken [with]
surrogates for wordsthe participants saw, in Lou Fant's virtuoso presentation, and many understood, actual sign language discourse informal authentic style. Moreover, the alternating presentation, first in Sign and then in English, freed both languages from the constraint of trying for simultaneity, so that the presenter's literary style in both languages could be appreciated. Thus we saw something more than a series of speakers saying that Sign was the language of the deaf and deserved respect. We saw the language in actual use we saw the deaf participants glowing with deserved gratificationno longer the second-class citizens at a convention of pedantic talkers but the respected and appreciated possessors of a language that the hearing participants were humbly striving to learn more about. . . Many of us are well aware that the meeting represented the state of the art in the study of sign languages the state of the art of utilizing what we know about Sign in schools and classes for the deaf is another matter . . . . Few school executives will even allow any talk about the use of American Sign Language in their classrooms and dormitories and grounds. Even new graduate students in linguistics who have not yet experienced the full heat of anti-Sign opposition or the dull,
plodding blindness to Sign of the less militant, more easygoing older teachers know full well that American Sign
Language is still

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