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

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Page his original mentors at the Buffalo seminar. While he continued to exhibit tremendous respect for their seniority and expertise,
his own growing expertise in sign language studies led him to declare "The sign language requires only a small, though radical,
change in the definition of language given by Trager: it is the cultural system which employs certain of the visible actions of the face and hands, combines them into recurrent sequences, and arranges these sequences into systematic distribution in relation to each other and in reference to other cultural systems" In deference to Trager, who observed that Stokoe's "initial study did not yet prove that American Sign Language was a language" Stokoe conceded that "whether it is a language in the full meaning of the term is a question the linguist ought not to judge until much more evidence . . . is available" But as a teacher, as "one who works with the deaf" he knew that the question "was long ago settled pragmatically.''24
It is difficult to measure and define the immediate impact of Stokoe's proclamation that the method deaf people were using to communicate among themselves was a genuine language. Even before the publication of his paper (and the subsequent publication of his Dictionary of American Sign Language),the oral-only method of instruction had begun to be recognized as a failure in this country, primarily by religious groups and by parents of deaf children who saw its dismal effects on their children's ability to learn.
By the s, according to Mimi WheiPing Lou, many seminaries were teaching sign language to students who aspired to work with the deaf community And in the early s Dorothy Shifflet, a high schoolteacher and hearing mother of a deaf daughter, developed anew system called "Total Approach" Hers was one of several sign systems that emerged at about the time that Stokoe was beginning to publicize his findings. All of these new systems, which continued to develop over the next twenty years, drew on Stokoe's research. (Ironically, many of the new systems undermined Stokoe's intention that American Sign
Language be recognized as a true language to be used by and with deaf people. Although the systems employed ASL

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