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No trecho do quarto parágrafo “a more comprehensive method”, a expressão sublinhada significa

How monks helped invent sign language

      For millennia people with hearing impairments
encountered marginalization because it was believed that
language could only be learned by hearing the spoken word.
Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, for example, asserted
that “Men that are deaf are in all cases also dumb.” Under
Roman law people who were born deaf were denied the right
to sign a will as they were “presumed to understand nothing;
because it is not possible that they have been able to learn to
read or write.”

      Pushback against such ideas began in the 16th-century,
with the creation of the first formal sign language for the
hearing impaired, by Pedro Ponce de León, a Spanish
Benedictine monk. His idea to use sign language was not a
completely new one. Native Americans used hand gestures
to communicate with other tribes and to facilitate trade with
Europeans. Benedictine monks had used them to convey
messages during their daily periods of silence. Inspired by
the latter practice, Ponce de León adapted the gestures used
in his monastery to create a method for teaching the deaf to
communicate, paving the way for systems now used all over
the world.

      Building on Ponce de León’s work, another Spanish
cleric and linguist, Juan Pablo Bonet, proposed that deaf
people learn to pronounce words and progressively construct
meaningful phrases. Bonet’s approach combined oralism
– using sounds to communicate – with sign language. The
system had its challenges, especially when learning the words
for abstract terms, or intangible forms such as conjunctions
like “for,” “nor,” or “yet.”

      In 1755 the French Catholic priest Charles-Michel
de l’Épée established a more comprehensive method for
educating the deaf, which culminated in the founding of the
first public school for deaf children, in Paris. Students came
to the institute from all over France, bringing signs they
had used to communicate with at home. Insistent that sign
language needed to be a complete language, his system was
complex enough to express prepositions, conjunctions, and
other grammatical elements.

      Épée’s standardized sign language quickly spread across
Europe and to the United States. In 1814 Thomas Gallaudet
went to France to learn Épée’s language system. Three years
later, Gallaudet established the American School for the Deaf
in his hometown in Connecticut. Students from across the
United States attended, and they brought signs they used to
communicate with at home.American Sign Language became
a combination of these signs and those from French Sign
Language.

      Thanks to the development of formal sign languages,
people with hearing impairment can access spoken language
in all its variety. The world’s many modern signing systems
have different rules for pronunciation, word order, and
grammar. New visual languages can even express regional
accents to reflect the complexity and richness of local speech.

(Ines Anton Rayas. www.nationalgeographic.com. 28.05.2019. Adaptado)