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Boston University students
See letters to the Daily Free Press, including letters from Kirk VanGilder (which were not published by the DFP).
Students from other institutions
Sarah Hafer, undergradute honors student, Department of Linguistics, University of New Mexico
Sarah Hafer
Undergraduate Honors Student, Department of Linguistics, University of New MexicoApril 21, 2004
Dear Dr. Carol Neidle:
Just like everybody else, I was deeply shocked that the Boston University has decided to reject American Sign Language once again to be accepted to their Foreign Languages program. Although I am only an undergraduate student graduating with honors in Linguistics in May 2004, I feel it is still important for me to "speak out" my view.
I am a fourth generation Deaf individual and I wholeheartedly oppose the statement made by the Boston University in which they claimed that American Sign Language is "English on Hands." What golden evidence do I have to present my view? I learned American Sign Language at birth, and I did not really get to learn English until around five years old. This was when I came to a silent shock in that English was a pure foreign language to me, because my programmed ASL system in my head was totally different from English. Thus, I sweated continuously throughout my primary and secondary years at the school trying to learn English through those teachers who actually used the "English on hands" communication system, known as Signed English and other English-based communication systems. And, today I still write English as a second language user; in that, they can recognize my writing as a non-native English user. Yet, they claim that ASL is "English on hands!"
One factor that might have caused the Boston University's Arts and Sciences' administrators to think ASL is "English on Hands" is it is often seen around that signers use a lot of English-based mouth movements when they sign in ASL. This is purely because the education system all over the country still has not established a strong and ideal instruction program for students of ASL in where their own ASL instructors and professors have a weakness of mapping English to ASL. They come from an even older generation where they were trained to use English-based mouth movements when signing in ASL, and the signed morphemes themselves actually do not parallel with English's structure. This bad habit also omits ASL's already established grammatical system of using adjectival and adverbial facial/mouth bound morphemes. Thus, this incident still happens in today's Deaf community because of people like your supposed-to-be supporters of the Boston University continue to not providing proper advocacy. Sure, there are some words in ASL that equal to English's words, but they may want to ask themselves would they call Chinese an English-based language if Chinese happens to have some words that equal to those of English's?
Only if I could I would have been very happy to show them a gem video clip of me as a six-year-old subject taped at Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, with your very own Deaf alumni, Dr. Benjamin Bahan. Dr. Bahan was working as a research assistant under Dr. Ursula Bellugi, an ASL researcher, and we had a conversation about how English and ASL differ. Yes, imagine a six-year-old Deaf child answering very efficiently in identifying which word belonged to English and which word belonged to ASL! If a six-year-old Deaf native signer could do this, why could not administrators in Boston University's Arts and Sciences be able to do the same thing? They should ask themselves this and I challenge them to step into learning some ASL words before making such ridiculous labels on ASL.
Finally, I hope they manage to get out of the naiveness and figure out whether they would have guts to tell a French speaker that French is actually an English-based language without learning their language first. I suppose they would not dare do this and I hope they realize that they should do the same to ASL language users rather than offending them naively even longer.
Sincerely,
Sarah Hafer
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[last modified 4/29/04 ]