SASL Newsletter - Fall 2019 Issue Issue 15 - Fall 2019 | Page 10

By Samuel B. Slike
On July 18, 2019, I received an email and link from the Society for American Sign Language
Journal stating that the attached link introduced the first special issue from the Society entitled,
Retrospective on Socially Impactful ASL/Deaf Studies Research and Scholarship from the 1960s to
2000s which included on a reprint of a 1960 article Sign Language Structure: An Outline of the Visual
Communication Systems of the American Deaf by Dr. William Stokoe (pp. 11 – 59). The article
reminded me of the time that I met Bill Stokoe and the profound impact he had on me.
On April 3, 1987, I had the distinct honor and pleasure of introducing Bill Stokoe to my
colleagues and students at Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania. We invited him to come to speak
to our Deaf Education, Interpreter Training, and Speech Pathology students about American Sign
Language and the impact that his research had on recognizing and proving that ASL is a language in
its own right. Knowing that I would introduce him to the group, I asked him what he would like me to
say. To my surprise, he pulled a piece of folded hotel stationary from his briefcase and proceeded to
write on it. He handed me the stationary and said, “say this”. Bill was a modest man and unassuming
in his approach. You would never know from his demeanor the battles that he fought in the mid-sixties
trying to convince his colleagues at Gallaudet that ASL was a language. His presentation was only for
an hour or so, but the explanations of his challenges in defending ASL as a language were delivered
by a true master.
I have been a student of American Sign
Language since the early ‘70s when I was a deaf
education undergraduate student at Penn State. In
those days, we were trained to be oral teachers of the
deaf, but we learned ASL by asking a Deaf graduate
student to teach us informally about this beautiful
language, away from our college classes. When I went
to my first student teaching assignment, my cooperating
teacher was a strict oralist, but she, and the school for
the deaf where I student taught, both encouraged us to
learn signed language. That is when I started hearing
about Bill Stokoe and his research regarding the
structure of ASL. Reflecting back, it amazes me that,
before the advent of video cameras and cell phones
(which can take videos at a moment’s notice), Bill was
using old-time movie projectors which he painstakingly
stopped frame-by-frame to go along with his creation of
cheremes to describe intricate formational differences in
the signs that his Deaf students used to communicate.
Bill Stokoe’s research and drive to prove to his
linguistics colleagues that ASL, an unspoken mode of
communication, was a language, with all of the nuances
Source: pdfs.semanticscholar.org/5d94/203a3b997198907f60ca44eed347114c27c8.pdf
of any language, truly intrigued me. It gave me great
pleasure to learn the definitions of tab, dez, and sig and
(Continue on the next page)
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The Power of ASL
10
Fall 2019 – Issue 15