Signifying as a Scaffold for Literary Interpretation: The Pedagogical Implications of an African American Discourse Genre.

Abstract

Signifying as Scaffold for Literary Interpretation: The Pedagogical Implications of an African American Discourse Genre, by Carol D. Lee. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1993. 200 pp. $22.95, paper. Reviewed by Arnetha F. Ball, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. To begin, I must confess that I have been interested in language and what people do with it for as long as I can remember. I grew up in an inner-city African American community in South Central Los Angeles and can recall developing an appreciation for powerful implications of skilled language use as I listened to my peers who had established themselves in positions of prestige within that community through skillful and strategic uses of the word in African American rhetorical tradition. Since that time, and influenced by those early experiences, two main concerns have shaped my professional career: one has to do with social and cultural of language, literacy, and learning among diverse populations; other has to do with social justice and belief that all learners should have access to quality, successful educational experiences. In my explorations of these issues, I came across Carol Lee's book, which is offered as one example of an instructional approach that speaks cogently to issues of language, literacy, and learning among African Americans-and, by extension, among other ethnic minority student populations-as well as to problems that plague literature instruction in U.S. schools. Lee notes in her introduction that one of her motivations for writing this book was her belief that It]he voices of America's diverse ethnic communities each have linguistic power that too often only creative writer-the novelist, poet, dramatist, creative essayist-hears and appreciates (p. 9). As response, she offers this study as an exploration of voice of one such community and of craft with which talk of that community is sculpted and re-created. In Signifying, Lee does not simply join ranks of those who posit positive self-esteem that Black students can gain from reading African American literature or that Mexican American students can gain from reading Chicano literature. Rather, she goes much further, proposing instead that intersection between voices and background experiences of novice readers from diverse ethnic communities and ethnic literature from those communities can have positive cognitive consequences in form of support for development of critical strategies for interpreting literature generally. To investigate this issue, Lee designed study that involved instruction over sixweek period (not including pre- and post-testing), with four experimental classes and two control classes in urban schools. This book reports on that study. Its 10 chapters are organized into three main segments: first presenting rationale for research, second detailing study particulars, and third reporting and reflecting on results of Lee's research, along with her comments on implications of study for classroom implementation. Chapter one provides an introduction and establishes context of problem. Though only two pages long, Lee succinctly states reasoning behind her study in these few words, which play vital role in setting tone for rest of book. Indeed, this brief introduction leads readers to contemplate seriously value of using an African American discourse genre as scaffold for literary interpretation. In chapter two, Lee builds upon discussion of literacy, which she defines as a set of social practices situated in specific sociocultural contexts (p. 3), to explain concept and importance of in African American community. According to Lee, signifying is an example of social discourse practice primarily used and rooted in that community. …