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

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 teachers1 use of call-and-response--rapid verbal interaction between speaker and listener 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. (AA)