Using Call-and-Response To Facilitate Language Mastery and Literacy Acquisition among African American Students. ERIC Digest.

Abstract

Despite three decades of research on African American English (AAE), educational workshops aimed at improving the academic achievement, particularly the literacy achievement, of African American students still emphasize differences between Standard English and African American English. One result is that teachers may overlook the linguistic resources of their African American students. A challenge for the research community now is to investigate how features of African American English might be used instructionally. Several researchers have noted teachers’ use of call-and-response—rapid verbal interaction between speaker and that has its origins in religious tradition—in classrooms composed of African American students. This digest presents a working definition of call-and-response, discusses relevant research on the use of this interactional strategy for instructional purposes, and presents examples from an ongoing study of elementary school classrooms to illustrate some of the fundamental, explanatory dimensions of this discourse pattern. Call-and-Response Smitherman (1977) defines call-and-response as verbal and non-verbal interaction between speaker and in which all of the statements (‘calls’) are punctuated by expressions (‘responses’) from the listener (p. 104). She suggests that responses function to affirm or agree with the speaker, urge the speaker on, repeat what the speaker has said, complete the speaker's statement in response to a request from the speaker or in spontaneous talking with the speaker, or indicate extremely powerful affirmation of what the speaker has said. Responses can follow from a speaker’s specifically requesting them or eliciting them by manipulating their own discourse, or they can be unsolicited and spontaneously interjected into the ongoing interaction (Foster, 1989). Call-and-response is not limited to verbal interaction. It occurs also in other media produced by African Americans, such as music and dance. My own definition of call-and-response draws on and extends Smitherman's: Call-and-response is a type of interaction between speaker and listener(s) in which the statements (calls) are emphasized by expressions (responses) from the listener(s), in which responses can be solicited or spontaneous, and in which either the calls or responses can be expressed linguistically, musically, verbally, nonverbally, or through dance.

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