DOCUMENT RESUME FL 022 370 ED 372 652 Minami, Masahiko AUTHOR TITLE Asian Narrative. PUB DATE (94) NOTE 48p. Evaluative/Feasibility (142) PUB TYPE Reports MF01/PCO2 Plus Postage. EDRS PRICE Cultural Literacy; *Cultural Traits; Culture DESCRIPTORS Conflict; Discourse Analysis; *English (Second Language); *Interference (Language); Japanese; *Language Patterns; Language Research; Literacy Education; Multicultural Education; *Story Telling; Uncommonly Taught Languages *Asian Languages IDENTIFIERS ABSTRACT The distinctive features of narratives told by Asians, particularly Japanese, who are non-native speakers of English and residing in the United States are analyzed. Focus is on the narrative structure produced and the communication problems occurring due to cultural traits, particularly as they differ from North American norms. Educational and sociocultural issues surrounding multicultural literacy programs as they concern Asian "voluntary minorities." Specific Asian cultural traits that affect classroom communication and participation are noted. Two approaches to multicultural literacy education, additive and social interaction, are described and their advantages outlined. A study of Japanese narrative types, based on data gathered in one community's schools, is then presented. Results are drawn from an analysis of oral and written narratives by native Japanese-speaking children, produced in interviews or in class. Instructional recommendations for teachers of Asian children, based on the additive and social interaction approaches to literacy instruction, are offered. These recommendations address communication, social, cultural, and pedagogical issues specific to this population. Contains 90 references. (MSE) *********************************************************************** * Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made * * * from the original document. *********************************************************************** Asian Narrativc 1 Asian Narrative Masahiko Minami Harvard Graduate School of Education PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE THIS U.S. DEPARTMENT Of EDUCATION MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY MK* ot Educatansf Research end tmorcnernem EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER IERICt ,1/4 1/4 document nes been reproduced as akthrs rectved horn Int person or oroenuloon 0oWneting o Monw changes have been made to "prove reproduCtiOn quality TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES Pornts of voevror orsmons Meted in ln.s ducu INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) ment do not nCeSalinly reptSent oflcaI OERI posthon or coots Running head: ASIAN NARRATIVE Harvard Graduate School of Education Author's Address: Larsen Hall Appian Way Cambridge, MA 02138 BEST COPY AVAILABLE 2 Asian Narrative Asian Narrative Masahiko Minami Graduate School of Education HOP AND BUNNY One little bunny came. It was so little bunny. 1 little bunny have One sister and one brother. The sister was very good a Artist and brother was so good boy. 3 4 But little bunny was no good. He doesn't help mother. 5 His little brother was all day help mother. 6 One day he goto shop with sister and brother and mother 7 But he don't wont goto shop. 8 And he goto another way. He walk and walk. 9 the owl. Hc saw thc owl. The owl asked him "You'cr Easter Bunny?" said 10 But the little bunny doesn't know Easter mean. 11 And little bunny say "I don't know." 11 "How bout You'er name." Said thc owl 13 "My name?" Said the little bunny. 14 "Yes You'er name." Said thc owl 15 "My name is Mark." Said the little bunny. 16 "Oh that good name Mark My namc is Jon." Said Jon 17 Hapns. "But I think I am Easter Bunny." Said Mark. And he tell the all 18 "Easter bunny was good bunny Oh so you to. 19 Now You'er not so good bunny You'er very good bunny 10 sister O.K.?" Said You tcik this buskat and eggs and give to You'er brother and 21 Jon 3 Asian Narrative 3 "Yes." Mark Said and he hop and hop and go buk To Home. THE END INTRODUCTION The above story was written by an 8-year-old Japanese girl, Tomoko eight months after she came to the United States from her native Japan. She wrote this story without any "scaffolding," which I will refer to later, and her invented spellings (Chomsky, 1975; Read, 1971) in the story--segmentation errors (e.g., "bout" on line 13 and "goto" on lines 7, 8, and 9) and phonetiz features (e.g., "teik" "buskat" on line 21 and "buk" on line 22)-- represent many aspects of her comprehension of English. (Note that each line indicates a page break and that each page includes a picture drawn by Tomoko.) Like Tomoko and her family, more than half a million immigrants from nearly onc hundred different countries and cultures comc to the United States each year; most of thcm speak languages other than English (Crawford, 1989, 1992; Hakuta, 1986). The last one and a half decades in particular have witnessed a rapid influx of immigrants from Asian and Latin American countries. The New York Timcs of April 28, 1993, summarizing the preliminary census data concerning demographic changes from 1980 to 1990, reports that the number of U.S. residents for whom English is a foreign/second language jumped by nearly 40 percent to 32 million. The inevitable consequence of this spike in immigration has been that a large number of children whose first language is not English are entering U.S. schools. According to the U.S. Department of Education (1992), in 1990-1991, approximately 2.3 million elementary and secondary school students lived in language-minority households, made substantial use of minority languages, and wcre identified as limited-English-proficient (LEP) children. Thc Stanford Working Group (1993) estimates that thc number of LEP children is much higher, 3.3 million between the ages of 5 and 17. As thc New York Times (April 28, 1993) also reports, there was a 50 percent growth from 1980 to 19(X) in the population of Spanish-speaking minorities, who arc 4 Asian Narrative 4 expected to become this country's largest minority group in the not-so-distant future. Similarly, there was also a sharp increase in the number of Asian-language speakers, such as Koreans (127 percent), Chinese (98 perccnt), and Japanese (25 percent). This rapid expansion in thc Asian population in the United States is a rather recent trend. As Yoshiko Uchida (1971) describes in her autobiographic novel Journey to Topaz, before World War II the Issei (the first generation of Japanese Americans) whe had come to thc United States from Japan wcrc, by law, never allowed to become U.S. citizens. As James Crawford (1992) puts it, the Asian immigration trend became noticeable only after 1965, when "Congress abolished the national-origins quota system, a racially restrictive policy that long favored northwestern Europeans and virtually excluded Asians" (p. 3). This paper focuses on distinctive features observed among narratives told by such Asians, Japanese in particular, in the United States. The focus of this paper is not the role of language processing per se; rather, regardless of the language they speak--thea native language or English--I would like to examine the narrative structure they produce. It is of course true that if different languages are spoken between the speaker/narrator and the listener, naturally critical communication problems will occur. However, even if the same language (i.e., English in the U.S. context) is spoken, if the manner of presentation and its resultant narrative discourse interaction Ftyle are different from what the listener is accustomed to, communication may be difficult. Unlike examining language itself (syntax, semantics, morphology, and phonology), however, capturing the role of narrative is sometimes elusive because whether a narrative is good or bad depends on whether or not the listener can comprehend what the speaker/narrator wants to convey in his or hersnarrative production. For example, imagine a 7-year-old Japanese boy who sounds likc a native speaker of English but was, in reality, raised in a Japanese-speaking family or neighborhood. Asked by an American teacher whether he has hurt himself, the boy might answer, "Yes, I have." The teacher takes pains to ask him to continue his injury story; the boy finally says, "I was 5 Asian Narrative 5 playing on thc monkey bars. And I got a splinter. And I had it pulled out." Because empathic consideration for others is highly valued in Japanese culture, even though the 7- year-old does not give any evaluative comments about his injury story, the Japanese listener in his family or neighborhood will empathize with the boy's deep hidden feelings (Doi, 1973). Conversely, expecting that the listener can understand his feelings, the boy tells his story without revealing his cmotions. perhaps, however, the American teacher who comes from the dominant/mainstream culture does not understand the boy's background culture and its preference for communicative compression. Perhaps, believing that children at age seven should have imagination and creativeness, the teacher judges the boy to have difficulty in expressing his feelings, and concludes that he should be placed in a different type of program. Cross-cultural miscommunications or misunderstandings between individuals are prevalent. One of the most prominent examples in contemporary popular culture is probably the musical Miss Saigon, an adaptation of Puccini's Madame Butterfly. However, cases such as the one mentioned above have been discussed in the light of a schema, a configuration of semantic memory that specifics the expected ordenng or permissible flow of information. Studies of schema, in fact, arc not new; Sir Frederic Bartlett's work (1932) on story recall of bizarre stories is considered thc beginning of that, due these studies. Among more recent studies, Kintsch and Greene (1978) claimed of stories, schemta arc to culturc-spccific aids to comprehension and reconstruction the culturally specific. Using a Native American story that was not in accordance with had Western norm of a good story, these researchers found that U.S. college students reconstructing the Native American story. Ernest some difficulty in comprehending and taken from Dubc (1977) also confirmed the tendency that people forget more in stories Furthermore, cultures that arc dissimilar to their own than in culturally similar stories. found that like the original Bartlett study, Harris, Lee, Henscly, and Schoen (1988) have bccn more foreign stories read to Americans were likely to bc "misremembered" to Asian Narrative 6 of culture-specific like American stories. We can, therefore, suppose that, because good. schemata, different cultures have different ideas of what makes a story narratives told by those Storytelling functions in Asian cultures are different from However, Asian who are from the dominant/mainstream culture in the United States. example, while Japan and China cultures cannot be lumped together in one category. For group-oriented norms prevail, these two nations differ are both Asian societies in which Wu, & Davidson, 1989). greatly in their standards of early childhood education (Tobin, (Taiwan), and U.S. Also, when comparing mathematics learning in Japanese, Chinese concluded that whereas Western elementary school classrooms, Stigler and Perry (1988) limitations), Asian educators tend to rely on nativism (children's inherently unique (all children's potential, educators are more comfortable with thc principle of empiricism similarities between Japan with proper effort to attain almost anything). In spite of such of lumping these Asians and China, however, these researchers warn about the danger performance oriented and together. They state that "Chinese classrooms arc morc 40), Japanese classrooms more reflective" (Stigler & Perry, 1988, p. and Bunyi (1993) Cultural differences arc also evident in Asian adults. Redmond the United Sta.es and examined gathered self-reports by international students residing in intercultural communication and the relationship between the degree of stress caused by that while students from China, Korea, how the students handled such stress. They found of stress compared to and Japan alike reported that thcy suffered from a great amount felt morc competent in handling Europeans and South Americans, Chinese students alone because Asians who live in the such stress than the other two nationals. Obviously ancestries, extrapolating from one United States arc from different groups, cultures, and anothcr culture is inappropriate at bcst, and Asian culture and its underlying values to lead to erroneous conclusions at making sweeping generalizations of Asian cultures characteristic features of Japanese worst. Thc goals of this paper arc, iherefore, to present those findings can be applied to children's narratives, and then to sec whether some of Asian Narrative 7 I believe narratives told by children from other Asian cultures such as China and Korea. that Japanese narrative can serve as a good basis for understanding narratives told by Asian children, because Confucian paradigms (e.g., the malleability of human behavior) that have supported East Asian cultures for centuries still underlie contemporary Japanese culture. A number of educational and sociocultural issues surround multicultural literacy programs. The educational issues include whether multicultural literacy programs encourage the academic achievement of children from minority backgrounds and, furthermore, whether they facilitate mainstream children's understanding of minority cultures. The social issues include the question of whether multicultural literacy examples programs promote cultural pluralism or separatism in the United States. In thc and case studies discussed here, multicultural literacy programs not only help ease thc learning process for non-mainstream children (e.g., language-minority Asian children), but also facilitac mainstream children's understanding of minority children and cultures. They also promote cultural pluralism and help maintain the ethnic identity of children from non-mainstream backgrounds. ISSUES SURROUNDING MULTICULTURAL LITERACY Different Types of Minorities Asians arc often considered "model minorities" in the United States. John Ogbu (1992) classifies minorities into two groups, castelike or involuntary minorities, and immigrant involuntary minorities, or voluntary minorities. Whereas African Americans belong to Asians, such as Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese, are representative of voluntary or immigrant minorities. According to Ogbu, moreover, involuntary minorities try to thcir ethnic identity and thcir preserve linguistic and cultural differences as symbolic of separation from the oppressive mainstream culture. In contrast, Ogbu argues that voluntary minorities generally believe that their lives in thc United States arc better than Asian Narrative 8 their lives in their native countries. They are therefore more likely to succeed than involuntary minorities, particularly in academic achievement. Voluntary minorities' positive appraisal of their situation is thus likely to have a positive influence on their overall performance. Yet, it is also true that voluntary minorities are at times stigmatized and treated in the same way that involuntary minorities arc. Voluntary minority students are sometimes not allowed to speak their first language in school settings (Crawford, 1989, 1992); according to Crawford (1989), for example, "until 1973 it was a crime in Texas to use a language other than English as the medium of public instruction" (p. 26). In such situations voluntary minoritics may fcel that they are treated as if they were castelike involuntary minorities. Therefore, regardless of their status, minority students (either voluntary or involuntary) may feel that they belong to subordinate groups and that thcy teachers from mainstream are lociked down on or even rejected by pecfs as well as backgrounds. Furthermore, because of Asian students' generally observant but passive participation style in the classroom, mainstream European Americans may tend, to interpret this behavior as a simple sign of passivity and thus may consider Asians being Miyanaga not so bright or even dull (Miyanaga, 1991). As Japanese researcher Kuniko (1991) noted, however--and, moreover, as one high school student who had recently immigrated from China to thc Unitcd States proudly protested at an interview for another project--Asians may consider that being quiet and listening intently in the classroom is active, not passivc, participation. More generally speaking, students from different cultures may have different ideas about how to participate in classroom activities. Unfortunately, however, mainstream Americans may have difficulty in understanding an Asian student's viewpoint. 9 Asian Narrative 9 Cultural Discontinuity and Societal/Structural Inequality Pe-e.ertual differences in what constitutes active and passive participation can clearly be attributed to differences in socialization between mainstream Americans and Asians. Shirley Brice Heath (1983) states that children growing up in European American middle-class families have different experiences from children in European American working-class families; especially with regard to behaviors and attitudes, they may possibly develop different expectations. Sarah Michaels (1981, 1991), observing "sharing time" classes, also draws the distinction between the ways that yorng African American and European American elementary-school children describe past events in their narratives. Differences between such groups thus seem to originate in socialization differences. The socialization process whereby the individual internalizes the values of thc society or community where hc or she lives has been extensively studied (e.g., Miller, Ochs & Schieffelin, 1984; Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986). By transferring a cultural 1982; who arc systcm from generation to generation, socialization generates individuals individual is competent in a society- or community-specific way. From babylicxxl on, an socialized in culturally specific ways, with the primary agent of socialization being thc family and local community. Once a child has started schooling, however, the primary the secondary agent of socialization changes from the primary speech community to and speech community, namely the school. Following the mainstrcam cultural norms values, this will often try to reshape the child's narrative discourse style and subsequent considered why literacy practices. Such discontinuity in socialization has generally been language-minority students do not necessarily prosper in U.S. school settings. Previous Scollon & Mchan, 1991; Philips, studies (e.g., Cook-Gumperz & Gumperz, 1982; 1982; have argued that since the narrative discourse practices of minority Scollon, 1981) school children's homes do not match thc narrative discourse practices of thc environment, problems in academic achievement tend to rise. 1 0