When Bill Stokoe went to Gallaudet to teach English, the school enrolled him in a course in signing. But Stokoe noticed something odd: among themselves, students signed differently from his classroom teacher.

　　Stokoe had been taught a sort of gestural code, each movement of the hands representing a word in English. At the time, American Sign Language was thought to be no more than a form of pidgin English . But Stokoe believed the hand talk his students used looked richer. He wondered: Might deaf people actually: have a genuine language? And could that language be unlike any other on Earth? It was 1955, when even deaf people dismissed their signing as substandard . Stokoe s idea was academic heresy .

　　It is 37 years later. Stokoe now devoting his time to writing and editing books and journals and to producing video materials on ASL and the deaf culture is having lunch at a cafe near the Gallaudet campus and explaining how he started a revolution. For decades educators fought his idea that signed languages are natural languages like English, French and Japanese. They assumed language must be based on speech, the modulation of sound. But sign language is based on the movement of hands, the modulation of space. What I said, Stokoe explains, is that language is not mouth stuff it s brain stuff.

　　21. The study of sign language is thought to be ________.

　　A) a new way to look at the learning of language

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