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Editorial
- Sign Language Studies
- Gallaudet University Press
- Volume 71, Summer 1991
- pp. 99-106
- 10.1353/sls.1991.0026
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
EDITORIAL Which question? The internationally known Swiss sign language researcher Penny Boyes-Braem said (at the 1990 International Congress on Sign Language Research & Application): The first research on sign languages using modern linguistic methods began about 30 years ago inthe United States and, a few years later, in Scandinavia. Most of this early research was not done by persons who worked with deaf persons as teachers, social workers, or pastors, but rather by linguists, persons trained to study how languages are structured. These researchers did not ask, "Issign language good or bad for the education of deaf children?" This is an important topic, but was not their first research question. The linguists were rather interested in questions such as, "Does this form of communication have a structure and ifso, isita linguistic structure?"I As one of those early researchers, I am moved to respond, partly because a reader might infer that I had the wit to ask only the second of her questions. I can be more precise about the timing. My own use of modem (e.g. Trager & Smith 1951) linguistic methods to study sign language structure began in June 1957, one-third of a century, ago. More important, however, is the question of priorities. I concentrated, as a student at a Summer Institute that year in the Anthropology Department chaired by George Trager, on the second of Penny's questions, fully expecting an affirmative answer. But I must protest that I was then (and for the next quarter century), precisely, as Penny puts it, one "who worked with deaf 1 Sign Language Research &Application, Prillwitz &Vollhaber eds. 1990. Hamburg, Germany.p.98. @1991 by Linstok Press, Inc. See note inside front cover ISSN 0302-1475 99 persons as [a] teacher." What motivated me to learn modem linguistic methods in Henry Lee Smith's course for English teachers at that Summer Institute was a strong desire to understand better the students in my courses at Gallaudet College, and, if it were possible, to learn more about their language so that I might make myself better understood by them. I had already discovered a larger proportion of highly intelligent and strongly motived students in my classes at the college than was usual in the hearing classes I had taught elsewhere. Much more than discovering the structure of the sign language they used I was interested in becoming better able to do them some good. Be it understood then, I was not a linguist-althoughI had been a student of Germanic and Classical philology in graduate school, and for several years was an avid reader of the writings of anthropological linguists. I was a teacher, deeply interested in the amazing abilities of students who could not hear my voice but could learn and learn and learn, despite my shortcomings as a communicator. As a teacher I knew that the sign language my students and deaf colleagues were using had structure, as any language has. I knew also that they were not talking while their hands made signs or fingerspelled words-what we hearing recruits to the Gallaudet faculty were taught to do. I knew something else: as a reader of writings by Ruth Benedict (1934) and other anthropologists, I knew that different societies might well possess very different cultures and that their languages could differ as widely as their customs, beliefs, activities, and physical constraints. And I also suspected something else: the Outline of English Structure by Trager and Smith (1951), which I had studied intensively during a 1953-54 leave, seemed to provide a method for examining language structure that might be as useful for signed language as it had proved to be for spoken languages. I must plead guilty, technically, to another of my good friend Penny's charges. I did not ask outright, "Is sign language good or bad for the education of deaf children?" First, I was not teaching deaf children but young (and older) deaf adults. Second, I did notopenly or to myself-pose that question because I already knew the SLS 71 WCS Summer 1991 answer. From my very first visit to Gallaudet College I had met deaf members of the faculty who were outstandingly skillful...