Seeing Essential English/Manual ed. by David Anthony (review)

REVIEW SeeingEssentialEnglish/Manual,ed. David Anthony. Anaheim Union High School District (P.O. Box 3520, Anaheim, California 92803), 1971. 2v., 543 pp. $5.70 postpaid. W.C.S. Seeing EssentialEnglish/Manualis a book in two looseleaf volumes containing an explanation, a grammar and a collection of several thousand signs for English words and morphemes. It is more than a book; it is more than 540 pages long; and it is more than open-ended. Blank pages in several places will be replaced by additions to be mailed to the buyer. Purchasers are sent a monthly newsletter which includes corrections and additions. S.E.E. is also a strategy for teaching the English language to deaf children and youth. It tries to get them inside the language as a native speaker is inside, and it tries to help them get the language inside themselves. S.E.E. is also a group of people and a movement. As a group it contains both deaf persons and hearing, both teachers and interpreters. As a movement it comprises those schools and classes for the deaf which use its strategy, its vocabulary of signs, and its philosophy of language learning. Besides all this S.E.E. is a language, a planned language. S.E.E. is therefore more than a book, a strategy, a group, a movement, and a language-it is an idea. It deserves a full scale review on each of these six counts, but that is hardly possible here. No authoritative evaluation of the strategy can be made now either. That will have to wait some years, until experience in using the strategy to teach by has tested it. One reaction to .the whole S.E.E. idea is that of Arthur 0. Washburn (Coordinator, Center for the Review Hearing Impaired, Community College of Denver, Colorado). In his Foreword to the Manual he states his own, an experienced teacher's, opinion: "This manual is undoubtedly the most exciting, impressive, and important guide for the teaching of English to deaf children that I have ever reviewed. I wish that I had had this manual in hand many years ago." The editor of the manual and the originator of the idea is David A. Anthony, a deaf son of deaf parents. In addition to explaining S.E.E. he has in the first 200 pages written a remarkable essay on deafness and language and much else. As a writer he should be compared with masters of a nearly impossible art, that of writing with excellence in an acquired, a second language. Laurent Clerc is such a one. Born deaf a few years before the 18th century began, Clerc was ten when Siccard opened a school in Marseilles and began teaching him with L'Ep6e's "methodical signs". Clerc accompanied Siccard when that great teacher succeeded his master as head of the Paris Institute. Clerc was 21 when he accompanied T. H. Gallaudet to America. His first language was Sign, his second French. English came after Latin and others. Nevertheless, in the early volumes of the American Annals of the Deaf there is not another writer who can match Clerc for English style. David Anthony has a style too. It is marked with his wit and self-deprecating humor, with charm and magnanimity. With it all he covers most of the topics familiar to those interested in the deaf and their education. Every item in the 140-item bibliography is there for use. His subject is language, his concern is the deaf child, his interest isin ways that this child can learn the English language, and yet his appeal is to the literate reader. The book and the strategy have the virtues of the originator. His own skill in writing a language that he has never heard is strong support for his method. His style attests that he would teach language, not strait-jacketed language. Some of the faults are his as well. He switches too quickly from Basic English, the origin of S.E.E. to the unlimited vocabulary of English. Basic English is a useful way of communicating with just 850 words and a workable but unbeautiful grammar. It can be used to...