The Beginnings of Research on British Sign Language

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• The Beginnings of Research on British Sign Language
• Bencie Woll (bio)

I was always fascinated as a child with language: I was New York City champion in the National Spelling Bee competition and spent one summer trying to teach myself Latin from a school textbook; by the age of thirteen, I had decided that I would study linguistics at university (although I didn't have a very clear idea of what linguistics actually was). After obtaining a BA and MA in linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, I moved to England to do an MA in linguistics and stayed on there as I started my academic career in the mid-1970s as a postgraduate researcher at the School of Education Research Unit at Bristol University, working on a project directed by Gordon Wells that was investigating language acquisition in a large sample of hearing children acquiring English as a native language. The project provided opportunities to explore language and communication from a systemic linguistic perspective, including research on interaction and communicative function as well as grammatical development.

The mid-1970s also saw the beginnings of interest in sign language in Britain. In a seminal paper published in 1975, entitled "Can Deaf Children Acquire Language?" Mary Brennan, a trainer of teachers of the deaf at Moray House College in Edinburgh, proposed for the first time that the terms British Sign Language and BSL be used to describe British Deaf people's use of sign. At the same time, Reuben Conrad was undertaking his influential project looking at the poor language and literacy achievements of deaf teens (Conrad 1979); both [End Page 350]

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Bencie Woll sharing research findings at a British Deaf Association conference in the 1980s.

Mary and Conrad challenged the assumptions that had underpinned the exclusive use of spoken languages in deaf education from the late nineteenth century. In 1977, Jim Kyle, a psychologist who had been the postdoc on Conrad's research project, joined the team at the Bristol Research Unit and began to develop plans for a new research project looking at cognitive and linguistic processes in BSL, while at the same time Mary established the Edinburgh BSL Project to carry out research into the grammar of BSL. These were great times for the development of BSL research: Dorothy Miles, the deaf Welsh poet and actor who had worked for many years in the United States with Klima and Bellugi, had just returned to live in the United Kingdom, while Margaret Deuchar was at Stanford University doing a PhD on diglossia in BSL (the first-ever PhD on BSL). Margaret continued to work on BSL for several years, but after some time moved into research focused more generally on sociolinguistics and bilingualism.

As one of the few linguists in the Research Unit in Bristol at that time, I was asked by Jim Kyle to comment on a draft of his research proposal. I was immediately taken with the idea of doing research on a language about which so little was known—and about which there would be opportunities to do original research on a variety of topics and subtopics—in contrast to child language acquisition research, [End Page 351] which I felt at that time had already become very specialized and narrowly focused. So, I decided that I would like to switch to doing sign language research and applied to join Jim's research team in 1978. Of course, I didn't know sign language and knew very little about BSL or the British deaf community. Jim also didn't have a great deal of BSL skill, but we worked closely with Peter Llewellyn-Jones, who was based at the Bristol Deaf Club and who was a BSL "missioner to the Deaf" (a now-extinct profession which combined the roles of social worker and interpreter).¹ We were aware of the gaps in our knowledge, and once the project was funded, these gaps were rapidly addressed by the inclusion of several native signing deaf researchers in our research team: first Gloria Pullen, then Jennifer Ackerman, Lorna Allsop, and Linda Day.

At that time, the recognition by all of the...