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

African American Review, Winter, 1995 by R. Baird Shuman

Carol Lee's aim in this study, which was the subject of her doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago, is to extend earlier research, notably that of Geneva Smitherman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in such ways as to make it applicable to teaching literature and skills of literary analysis to high-risk inner-city students. Smitherman's Talkin' and Testifyin': The Language of Black America (1977) and Gates's The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (1988) both emphasize the unique nature of Black English, but, rather than dismissing it as an inferior dialect, as some earlier scholars did, Gates and Smitherman relate it to a genre that capitalizes on the use of colorful metaphor, hyperbole, and other devices commonly found in mainstream literature from Beowulf to Tom Wolfe.

Lee writes that signifying within the African American community "means to speak with innuendo and double meanings, to play rhetorically upon the meaning and sounds of words, to be quick and often witty in one's response." She notes that, within this community, "... the adolescent ... who cannot signify has no status and no style, is kind of an outsider who is incapable of participating in social conversation" (11). This observation is crucial to the hypotheses on which she bases her study.

Lee's stated hypotheses are that "students' prior social knowledge of the themes, values, and social conventions on which texts are based and their skill in signifying may be productively drawn upon to teach skills in literary analysis." She continues, "The hypotheses assert that students with appropriate prior social knowledge and skill in signifying will make gains in the broad category of inferential levels of comprehension. Specifically," she goes on, "I hypothesize that students will achieve gains in the difficult category of complex implied relationships" (46).

A preliminary review Lee conducted of book-length works that appeared on English department reading lists for grades seven through twelve in a broad range of public, private, and Roman Catholic secondary schools yielded 630 titles. Of these, fewer than ten were works written by African Americans. The implication, of course, is that inner-city students upon whom such reading lists are imposed begin with a singular disadvantage because both the social and linguistic backgrounds of the works they are expected to read lie largely outside their culture and experience.

Lee identifies an additional problem in pointing out that, when Zora Neale Hurston's novels and short stories first appeared in the mid-1930s, capturing the authentic conventions and cadences of Black English Vernacular (BEV), such black literary legends as James Weldon Johnson and Richard Wright took her to task for using BEV in her writing. This contention is easily documented, but seems peculiar in this context because, twelve pages earlier, Lee identifies Johnson and Wright as being among a handful of African American writers who "publicly avowed their role as tellers of the stories of the people, as interpreters of the sociopolitical realities which the people experience, and as maintainers and shapers of the language" (9; italics added). Despite this apparent contradiction, Lee successfully makes the crucial point that inner-city black students are essentially exposed to a literature that is alien to their backgrounds and, being unable to relate to or to understand this literature, they are stymied in their efforts to develop the more sophisticated literary skills that advanced study and understanding of literature demand.

Lee nowhere suggests that inner-city youth should read only the works of African American authors. Rather, she supports the notion that an early introduction to quality literature provided by reading the works of authors whose writing reflects a familiar culture and employs a familiar language will help inner-city students develop abilities they can apply to reading all literature.

The experimental part of Lee's study was conducted over a six-week period in two inner-city secondary schools (whose anonymity she agreed, before she began her study, to preserve). One school had an Africar. American population of 99.9%; the population in the other was 100% black. Six senior English classes were involved - four experimental and two control. Lee herself taught one experimental class in each school. Veteran teachers - three of whom had twenty-five years of teaching experience, the other seventeen - taught the other four classes. All but one of the teachers involved in the project held advanced degrees (two had two master's degrees, one a Ph.D.). All of the teachers conferred regularly with Lee and observed her classes, whose format was fundamentally small-group.

Before the six-week experiment began, Lee and the other teachers administered three pre-tests (reproduced in Appendices B and C): One was on a story they had not read previously that reflected all of the components of George Hillocks' hierarchy of reading skills applicable to the interpretation of fiction; one tested their knowledge and skills in signifying; and one tested their prior social knowledge. A post-test (reproduced in Appendix B) was given immediately following the six weeks of instruction. It tested students on Hillocks' hierarchy based on a long passage they had not read before.