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

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lication of Syntactic Structures had won him wide recognition in linguistic circles. Stokoe "had no idea who he was. That was soon remedied as I attended Linguistic Society meetings and read journals and realized that a revolution had taken place in linguistics . . . . I tried, of course, to read Syntactic Structures, but it seemed to fit neither what I'd learned from Smith and
Trager about language nor my growing understanding of at least some mathematic principles" While Stokoe continued to explore linguistics, he was "still trying to help deaf students get the hang of English sentences" He and some colleagues attended meetings sponsored by the National Conference of Teachers of English. Again, Stokoe heard
Chomsky speak, and he began to realize that Chomsky's fundamental theories were "making it possible for modern linguists to see both spoken and signed languages as coming from the brain."10
Stokoe became increasingly adept at recognizing aspects of American Sign Language that no one had paid much attention to before, and he began to realize just how detrimental that lack of attention had been for deaf students. He was losing patience with teachers who spent their time complaining that the college shouldn't have let the students in because they didn't know how to write an
English sentence and because their vocabulary was lacking and because their grammar was nowhere.
I remember once when one of the old-line teachers complained about her students at a faculty meeting with a psychiatrist who had become deaf and changed his practice to specialize in deaf patients. He was saying that deaf people are very self- reliant and independent, more so than his hearing patients. This teacher spoke up and said she found it to be just the opposite. She could tell her students to go fora job interview, and even if she wrote the information down, they might not turn up for the interview. Even in class, she said, when she'd ask a question, there wouldn't be anybody volunteering an answer, so she'd ask the question again.
As a member of the audience I stood up and said to the teacher, "How did you ask the question" She said that, for

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