Introduction: Academic Acceptance of American Sign Language

INTRODUCTION: ACADEMIC ACCEPTANCE OF AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE Sherman Wilcox University of New Mexico 'The movement to accept ASL throughout America is like a slow-building ground swell of water," according to Gary W. Olsen, Executive Director of the National Association of the Deaf.1 "It gains momentum as it swells and so is the acceptance of ASL." Undoubtedly true, but the ground swell has been slow to emerge in academia. Although ASL has a long and rich history in America and scholarly research on ASL is in its third decade, ASL has been slow to garner any degree of status in the academic community. As recently as 1980, for example, Battison and Carter (1981:viii) conceded that "as far as we know, no colleges or university has yet made Sign Language a permanent part of its foreign language curricula, on a par with the other foreign languages they teach." This situation is beginning to change. The issue of academic acceptance of ASL "has come up, and by all indications is going to keep coming up" (Chapin, this issue). Consider my own experience. In the period from August 1987 to April 1988, I was contacted by individuals in California, New York, Ohio, Illinois, ISherman Wilcox is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Bachelor of Science Degree Program in Sign Language Interpreting, Department of Linguistics, University ofNew Mexico. He would like to thank the many people who have helped to make this special issue become a reality: Nancy Frishberg and Susan Rutherford for their encouragement and direction; William Stokoe for making available an expanded edition of Sign Language Studies; Larry Gorbet for his desktop publishing expertise and many hours of editing assistance; and, of course, the authors. @1988 by Linstok Press, Inc. 101 ISSN 0302-1475 see note inside front cover Introduction Missouri, Wyoming, Massachusetts, Iowa, and several other states; by representatives of Boards of Regents for university systems in Tennessee and Massachusetts; by state commissions for the deaf, colleges and universities, state departments of education, state legislatures, and the news media. The other authors in this special issue could relate the same story. One possible explanation for this recent surge of interest in acceptance of ASL as a foreign language may be the fact that many educational institutions which had dropped foreign language requirements are now reinstituting them. Our current round of educational reforms, however, often has been driven by economic motivations. When applied to the question of foreign language instruction these motivations are sometimes used to argue against acceptance of ASL. The essence of the claim is that traditional foreign languages such as French or German must be taught because professionals need to read scholarly literature in them; there is a vocational motivation for learning one ofthese languages that does not exist for ASL. Even if we could justify vocationalism as the only or most important goal of education, and I believe we cannot (see, for example, Dewey 1916), the appeal to vocational criteria to justify foreign language requirements does not hold. In an address to a joint meeting of the Washington and Oregon Association of Foreign Language Teachers, Glenn Crosby, a professor of chemistry and chemical physics, asked whether scientists need foreign languages to practice their craft. His answer was that they do not. Still, Dr. Crosby supported foreign language requirements for undergraduate students. "Foreign language acquisition is necessary," he maintained, "to be an educated, sentient person with empathy for foreign peoples and cultures and a capacity to experience the world through other eyes, other words, and from other orientations. Explain to undergraduates or high school students that their lives will be immeasurably impoverished without an understanding of the relationship oflanguage to culSLS 59 Summer 1988 ture and of language to thought" (Crosby, 1987:183). These reasons are entirely compatible with the arguments put forward here in support of ASL as a foreign language. Paul Chapin opens this special issue by examining the educational purposes of foreign language requirements. One of the goals of studying a foreign language, he asserts, is to understand language as a structured system. Even a brief exposure to a different language compels students to confront language at a more abstract level. Students come away from...