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

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Page His manual dexterity or fluency or smoothness in signing really leaves something to be desired. He's easy to understand fora person like me Jordan lost his hearing as a young adult. I honestly don't know fora person who is not as fluent in English as II don't know how easy Bill would be to understand. He knows all the signs and he doesn't have to look for the right sign. He just doesn't sign easily. He seems to have to work to do it" It seems ironic the man many describe as "the Father of American Sign Language" doesn't sign very well. Perhaps Stokoe's difficulty in using the language, his inability to take it for granted as simply a method of communication, and his need to look at it carefully were responsible, in part, for his discoveries. It took an "outsider" to see what had been there all along.
But it took a special kind of outsider one who believed that "the study of sign language could free . . . a teacher from the fear and ignorance that equate all knowledge and thought with a single language Carol Padden says in describing Bill Stokoe's limitations as a signer, "His fingerspelling is usually unreadable, but I'd rather have novelty and intelligence with bad finger spelling than oppression and intolerance disguised in great signing skills."11
Stokoe has his own theory about his entry into sign language research. He once heard his son, Jim, reading a story to his grandson, Nathaniel. When the boy in the story declared that he wanted to be a veterinarian who talked to animals, Dr. Dolittle replied "First, I've got to ask you, are you a noticing person" And that, Stokoe says, is as good a description of his philosophy as any:
A hearing person entering into a deaf environment must notice what is going on. I think that one of the first things I
noticed was that the deaf people on campus didn't communicate the way we were being told we should communicate in our classrooms.
Then you've got to notice what the students can do. Don't read the literature on deaf education because that will tell you what they can't do. That will tell you about the hearing loss, the mental deficit, the language deficit, the years of retarda-

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