True Story 10.08
Fictional characters and Hmong English language learners
The setting for this story
Christina was an English language teacher working in a Midwestern city with Hmong men and women who had recently immigrated from China, Vietnam, and Laos. Early in the semester, she used a reading that featured “Tim,” a character who was portrayed as working as a janitor in a large building. As Christina explains, a story about a fictional character proved distracting.
A story of misaligned minds11
We had just finished the first reading of the story about Tim. One of my Hmong students, whose day job is cleaning office buildings, spoke up: “Where Tim work? Same place me?”
I said, “Oh, Tim is not a real person. He’s not alive. He doesn’t work. He’s just a character in this story.” The student looked skeptical, to say the least. But he didn’t say anything more.
But the next day, when we were reviewing Tim’s story, the same Hmong man asked again, “Where Tim work? He work same place me?”
During the coming weeks, I also found that whenever I used oral drills featuring fictional characters with names that are familiar to the Hmong, many of my Hmong students started asking each other who that person is, where he or she lives and works, and to whom they might be related.
Christina’s question
Why do my Hmong students keep acting as though these fictional characters are real people?
Critique of story 10.08
Answering Christina’s question invites us to put ourselves in the shoes of people raised in social and environmental surroundings very different from those of our upbringing.
In American society during our times, the great majority of children grow up in surroundings infused with analytic thinking that is modeled for them by their parents and family acquaintances, reinforced by their teachers’ lessons, and validated everywhere within sight by the products of analytic thought. Consider, for example, that many toys have multiple parts intended for the child’s manipulation (doll houses, building sets, model trains, etc.). Therefore, modern children become adept at regarding people, things, and events in terms of their parts, which they learn to regard separately from their associated wholes and from the wider contexts in which the wholes exist.
While children in modern societies are being taught how to read, they’re introduced to all sorts of story characters: (a) real people living nearby in the present, (b) real people, alive and dead, living in unfamiliar locales in the present and in the past, and (c) fictional characters who exist in a variety of locales including totally fabricated never-never lands. Now note that the distinctions I just made involve isolated and categorized features of the characters in children’s stories – real or fictional; alive or dead; present or past; nearby, distant, or never-never. That’s analysis in action.
Traditional and indigenous peoples such as the Hmong raise their children in extended families and small villages where almost all thought is holistic (or relational). People, things, and events are anchored in the familiar context of here and now. Reading is poorly learned, if at all. In such surroundings, children probably never encounter the notion of imaginary people. If their culture includes accounts of legendary beings, it’s likely that such beings are regarded as real, not as the products of someone’s imagination. All their lived experiences are with real people who reside nearby in well-known places, have relatives and friends, and do familiar jobs. Every human who is personally known, or known about, is real and exists in a familiar context.
So it’s not surprising that when a fictional person or event is brought to their attention, they don’t know what to make of it. Christina tried to help her inquisitive Hmong student grasp what’s happening by explaining that “Tim is not a real person.” Let’s listen to that statement from the Hmong student’s perspective: What does “Tim is not a real person” even mean?
Adults from holistic backgrounds, therefore, will try to make stories such as Tim’s fit into the context they know well: living people here and now. Hence, “Where Tim work? Same place me?”
For thought
Christina’s teaching is largely, if not entirely, dependent on published English-learning materials that were conceived by authors who are entirely comfortable writing about imaginary people and events. (In our society, we admire authors of fiction for their creativity!) If Christina is going to have materials that are more attuned to her Hmong adults, she’ll probably need to write them herself – no small task for which she won’t be compensated. What would you suggest to Christina?
Related stories
Story 4.01 also is about Hmong adults in the U.S. learning English; story 1.14 is about a Korean adult in the U.S. who also is learning English.
Stories 4.074.07, 4.09, 7.15, 10.02, 10.04, and 10.07 discuss adults or older students, not in the U.S., who are trying to learn a new language (usually German).
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Endnotes:
11 Hvitfeldt, 71.
Full citations are available at misalignedminds.info/References.