ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, March 10, 1996 TAG: 9603110002
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: CHARLOTTESVILLE (AP)
SOURCE: CHRIS SNOWBECK THE DAILY PROGRESS
A SIGN LANGUAGE TEACHER at the University of Virginia helps people learn to talk visually.
The roaring silence in Room 132 of Cabell Hall on Friday afternoons is so pervasive that even the sound of pen meeting paper is often startling.
``You have to take it all in visually,'' said Andrea Meador, 18, of Vinton, one of 20 University of Virginia students taking a course this semester in American Sign Language. ``When the teacher said `From now on, no talking allowed,' I just thought I'd never be able to do it. ... Now, I don't even notice the silence, because you're focusing so hard on the learning.''
Chris Krentz, the graduate student who teaches the course, explains the quiet this way: ``If people talk, they think in English. ... If they write an explanation down, they write it down in English.
``I'm trying to get them to think visually. They need to think like a deaf person. You don't really learn a language until you learn to think like the native user does.''
Krentz wants to create an environment in which students rely on their eyes to take in information, hoping that they can begin to appreciate the world of deaf people.
And in the coming years, Krentz wants to see this silence spread.
Krentz and a small group of area activists have begun discussions with university officials about creating a faculty position to teach ASL. Although the talks are only in the preliminary stages, Krentz said he is encouraged by the feedback he has received from university administrators.
The driving force behind the movement to create an adjunct faculty position is a philosophy about deaf culture that Krentz presents to his students.
``American Sign Language is not English on the hand, it's not broken English,'' he said. ``It's separate, it's visually based. It has its own syntax and grammar,'' and like any language, it carries with it a distinct storytelling tradition.
Krentz uses stories in his class to teach vocabulary and to see if students can follow the signs.
In one story, a lumberjack marches through the woods in search of trees to chop down. When he finds one, the lumberjack begins hacking away, with Krentz pantomiming the movements and explaining with signs the details of the narrative.
After felling two trees, the lumberjack chops and chops and chops at a third. Krentz silently yells ``Timber!'' but nothing happens. He silently yells ``Timber!'' again, but the tree won't budge.
The problem, Krentz signs eventually, is that the tree is deaf.
Half the class laughs, with the other half needing a slower explanation.
``It's not an easy language,'' Krentz said of ASL. ``It's like French or German or Spanish. It's a foreign language. It requires serious study.''
On a recent Friday, Krentz instructed his students to stand up, move about the room and engage one another in signed, silent conversation. About 10 minutes passed, then Krentz flicked the lights in the room off and on to get the class's attention.
When the students were seated, he called individuals to the board and asked them to copy the figures he drew with his fingers. His hands first traced a triangle. Keeping the same reference point, his hands next traced a circle. The students at the board drew a triangle and then a circle below it, not noticing at first that Krentz had described a circumscribed triangle.
``I'm trying to give them a sense of space,'' Krentz explained after the class. ``ASL is a very three-dimensional language, and you have to use space in very specific, careful ways. When you give directions, you need to show relationships between things.''
The university offers one class in American Sign Language, which is usually filled by master's degree candidates in education, speech language pathology or audiology but has many undergraduate students taking the course this year. Krentz's class this semester is unusual in the number of undergraduate students taking the course, he said.
``One useful thing for students would be to acquire knowledge of a language that is very different from English not only by being visual, rather than oral, but also in terms of grammatical structure,'' said Ellen Contini-Morava, an anthropology professor involved in discussions about ASL. ``The same sort of argument could be used as to why it's important to study Arabic or Japanese.
``But then, of course, there is the practical point that ASL is used by a large number of people in the United States.''
ASL is the third most-used language in the country, according to Krentz, and is taught in about 68 colleges and universities.
LENGTH: Medium: 88 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. Sherida Cladwell, 18, practices American Signby CNBLanguage at the University of Virginia. color.