Reviewed by dint of R.

Reviewed by dint of R. Baird Shuman University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Carol Lee's aim in this research which was the subject of her doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago, is to increase earlier research, notably that of Geneva Smitherman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr in like ways as to make it applicable to teaching literature and skills of literary analysis to high-risk inner-city learners 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) the two emphasize the unique nature of Black English, if it be not that rather than dismissing it as an inferior dialect, as an earlier scholars did, Gates and Smitherman relate it to a genre that capitalizes in succession the use of colorful metaphor, exaggeration and other devices commonly build 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 on the meaning and sounds of words, to be quick and repeatedly witty in one's response." She notes that, within this community, " the adolescent who cannot signify has no status and no diction is kind of an outsider who is incapable of participating in social conversation" (11) This observation is crucial to the hypotheses upon which she bases her study

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

A preliminary review side sheltered from the wind conducted of book-length works that appeared forward English department reading lists for grades seven by means of twelve in a broad range of public, private, and Roman Catholic secondary trains yielded 630 titles. Of these, fewer than ten were works written by the agency of African Americans. The implication, of course, is that inner-city scholars upon whom such reading lists are imposed begin with a singular disadvantage because the one and the other the social and linguistic backgrounds of the works they are awaited to read lie largely outside their tillage and experience.

Lee identifies an additional point to be solved [i]or[/i] settled 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), like 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, on the contrary seems peculiar in this connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts because, twelve pages earlier, leeward identifies Johnson and Wright as being among a handful of African American writers who "publicly avowed their part as tellers of the stories of the the public as interpreters of the sociopolitical realities which the commonalty experience, and as maintainers and shapers of the language" (9; italics added). Despite this apparent contradiction, to leeward successfully makes the crucial point that inner-city black close examiners 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 unravel the more sophisticated literary skills that advanced investigation and understanding of literature demand.

Lee nowhere intimates that inner-city youth should read alone the works of African American authors. Rather, she supports the notion that an early introduction to quality literature provided by the agency of reading the works of authors whose writing throw backs a familiar culture and make use ofs a familiar language will help inner-city bookish mans develop abilities they can apply to reading all literature.

The experimental part of Lee's thought was conducted over a six-week period in couple inner-city secondary schools (whose anonymity she agreed, before she began her application of mind to preserve). One school had an Africar. American population of 999%; the population in the other was 100% black. Six senior English classes were involved - four experimental and pair control. Lee herself taught individual experimental class in each train Veteran teachers - three of whom had twenty-five years of teaching experience, the other seventeen - taught the other four classes. All on the other hand one of the teachers involved in the exhibit held advanced degrees (two had sum of two units master's degrees, one a PhD) All of the teachers conferr regularly with lee-side and observed her classes, whose format was fundamentally small-group.

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