How one woman carved out a career in linguistics for herself and others
where there had been none.
If not for the shorter duration (and lower tuition) of a master’s degree program in England compared to the US, Bronx-born Bencie Woll CW’70 might well have missed out on becoming a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE) in a ceremony at Windsor Castle last February—and the United Kingdom would have lost a pioneering scholar on the linguistics of British Sign Language and a longtime advocate for deaf education.
From childhood, Woll was fascinated by how language worked. She was borrowing library books on the history of English starting at age 10, and one summer tried to teach herself Latin from a textbook. By 13, she knew she wanted to study linguistics, even though she was not quite sure what it was. At 16, having skipped a few grades along the way, she graduated from the Bronx High School of Science and headed to Penn, one of the few colleges in the US offering an undergraduate major in linguistics. She studied psycholinguistics, the history of the English language, syntax, and phonology with figures including George Cardona, Henry Hoenigswald, Henryk Hiz, Zellig Harris, William Labov, and Henry and Lila Gleitman.
After graduating from Penn, she discovered that she could earn a master’s degree in one year in England, as opposed to the customary two years for programs in the US. After completing her degree in theoretical linguistics at Essex University in 1971, in 1973 she took a position as a research assistant at the University of Bristol, where she researched child language development. At Bristol, where she would eventually rise to senior lecturer and director of the university’s Access for Deaf Students Initiative, she began a 15-year collaboration with a psychologist named Jim Kyle, whose research interest lay with deaf teenagers.
“Fifty years ago deaf people in England were living in the 19th century,” Woll says. “British Sign Language had no public presence. There were no interpreters next to politicians or captions on television. Deaf children attended residential schools and were publicly invisible. No one saw them. If deaf people knew sign language, they were self-conscious about signing. Children sat on their hands. They were punished for signing at school.” One of her deaf colleagues, for instance, recalled being caught signing at a school assembly. “The headmistress announced that he looked like a monkey, waving his hands everywhere.”
Deaf schools had existed in the UK since the mid-1700s and signing was prevalent until the late 19th century, when there was a strong movement toward oral-only communication. From then on, deaf children in England were only allowed to learn spoken English in the classroom, not sign language. Kyle had been involved in a study demonstrating that deaf education in Britain was a failure. It showed that deaf 16-year-olds were reading at a nine-year-old level, on average. They were functionally illiterate, and their speech was unintelligible. However, sign language was helpful in learning to read, which spurred interest in using it as an educational tool.
With three years of government funding, Woll and Kyle did a large study, collecting recordings from deaf and hearing people. That helped them formally characterize the linguistics and sociolinguistics of British Sign Language and the nature of the British deaf community. Woll also received funding to research the history of British Sign Language and its application around England. She looked at sign language in education and at the teaching of sign language. They found that deaf people think differently from hearing people. For example, they are better than hearing people at remembering spatial information.
The field of sign language research was taking off, and Woll, who received her PhD in sign language linguistics from Bristol in 1992, was at the forefront. (Though they share a similar structure and grammar, British and American sign languages have different signs. Woll is fluent in British Sign Language.) Woll and Kyle organized the first workshop on British Sign Language in 1979, and cofounded the Centre for Deaf Studies at Bristol, Britain’s first research center in the field, persuading the university to fund research and teaching programs and facilities to attract deaf students and researchers. At that time there were few deaf people who had graduated from university, but that began to change.
In 1985, Kyle and Woll published Sign Language: The Study of Deaf People and Their Language, which they described as an effort to “highlight the richness and value of deaf people’s lives and language” rather than “prescribe methods for solving deaf people’s ‘problems.’” Their work was in tune with international academic trends promoting greater attention to other marginalized groups, as with women’s studies and Black studies.
In 1995, Woll moved to City, University of London to become the school’s first professor and chair of Sign Language and Deaf Studies, and in 2005 became professor of Sign Language and Deaf Studies at University College London (UCL), where she led the creation of the Deafness Cognition & Language Research Centre. She directed the center until 2016 and retired from UCL in 2019. She remains an honorary professor in the Division of Psychology and Language Sciences.
The MBE is awarded for contributions to British society and service to the country and covers all types of standouts in their fields. Woll’s award was for service to higher education and deaf people. At the ceremony on February 21, 2024, Woll told Prince William (filling in for King Charles) that she had met his mother on two occasions in association with Princess Diana’s role of patron of the British Deaf Association, including one where Diana had given a short speech in British Sign Language, learned for the occasion. William said he remembered his mother studying sign language and that she had worked very hard on it.
A festschrift volume collecting chapters written by past students and collaborators on research related to Woll’s work—Understanding Deafness, Language and Cognition Development: Essays in Honor of Bencie Woll—was published in 2020. At a COVID-delayedretirement event in her honor in November 2022, former postdoc and City, University of London professor Gary Morgan praised Woll as being “great at encouraging us to get out of our comfortable chairs and meet other people doing stuff like we’re doing and enriching our research.”
Woll is committed to building capacity for deaf researchers. She has helped some to develop careers working on clinical cognitive and brain issues, and others to become sign language linguists.
She’s also driven to make things easier for others than it was for her starting out in the 1970s and ’80s. In those days, you were mostly “on your own,” she says. “No mentoring was available—it didn’t exist.” There were very few women in leadership positions, and for a long time Woll herself didn’t look beyond research.
Beginning with her role as department chair at City, University of London in 1995, Woll has emphasized mentoring both hearing and deaf people, devoting hours daily giving advice and feedback on papers or research grant applications, as well as practical advice on professional advancement.
Though officially retired, Woll continues to pursue research as a co-investigator. Consulting for the British Department of Education, she has helped to develop the curriculum for a high school sign language qualification. Scheduled to begin in the fall of 2025, the curriculum will allow high school students to learn sign language instead of French, Spanish, or German.
A prize was recently established in her name by UCL colleagues for the best published research in British Sign Language. The Professor Bencie Woll Research Prize is awarded every two years, with priority given to early-career researchers and deaf researchers. Woll believes there isn’t enough recognition, which is important for early-career researchers. Decades after saving herself a year on her academic journey, this linguistics pioneer remains determined to open more doors for underrepresented groups and continue her work as an ally to deaf people.
—Jean M. Clemons CW’69 WG’82
