La Pera stories: cognitive and cultural alignment of narrative production by bilinguals in the U.S. – Mexican borderlands

ABSTRACT

This article aims to map differences in narrative choices by bilingual subjects, to measure the degree of alignment of such choices with HCC (high-context communication) or LCC (low-context communication) modes, and to propose pedagogical implications in the essay writing classroom for fully native, ‘simultaneous’ bilinguals. We describe an experiment seeking to identify patterns of narrative strategies in English/Spanish bilingual subjects by comparing data with previous iterations in a number of countries, languages, and cultures under what came to be known as The Pear Stories in the 1980s and The Pear Tree Project in the early 2010s.

El presente artículo pretende cartografiar las diferencias en las elecciones de carácter narrativo que realizan sujetos bilingües y medir el grado de alineamiento de dichas elecciones con modos comunicativos de alta y baja contextualización (respectivamente, HCC y LCC por sus siglas en inglés), planteando consideraciones pedagógicas para el aula de redacción que se derivan de lo anterior en el caso de personas con un grado de bilingüismo nativo. Se describe un experimento para identificar pautas en las estrategias narrativas que adoptan sujetos bilingües en inglés y en español, mediante la comparación con datos procedentes de la realización, en varios países, lenguas y culturas de los experimentos que se vinieron a conocer como The Pear Stories y The Pear Tree Project en las décadas de 1980 y 2010, respectivamente.

KEYWORDS:

• Narrative choices
• world view
• cultural alignment
• bilingualism
• writing pedagogy
• audio description

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the assistance of Maritza Cisneros in the tabulation of raw data. Research supported in part by PGC2018-096566-B-I00 (MCIU/AEI/FEDER, UE).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

José Dávila-Montes is Professor of Translation and Interpreting. He has taught Translation, Interpreting, Spanish and Japanese Language since 1999. He studied in Barcelona Autonomous University (Barcelona, Spain), where he obtained his BA + MA in Translation and Interpreting and a PhD in Translation and Cross-Cultural Studies. He also studied in Dublin City University (Dublin, Ireland), Toyo University (Tokyo, Japan), and the State University of New York at Binghamton (New York), where he obtained an MA in Spanish Literature. He worked for over a decade as translator, interpreter, editor, project manager and publisher, in English, Spanish, Japanese and Catalan, producing encyclopedias, dictionaries and other reference works, multimedia products and language courses, and being involved in the publishing of over 150 titles. He has been the coordinator of two fully online MA programs in Translation delivered by the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain and by the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, where he also was the director of the Translation and Interpreting Programs for 12 years. He also taught translation, interpreting, Spanish, and Japanese language in the State University of New York at Binghamton (USA), Dublin City University (Ireland), and Hunter College of New York (USA).

Dr. Lyon Rathbun is a professor of Rhetoric and Composition in the Department of Writing and Language Study at the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley, where he teaches courses in writing, the pedagogy of writing, and the history of rhetoric. He earned his PhD from the Rhetoric Department at the University of California, Berkeley and has published articles in writing pedagogy and American cultural history. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, received a Graduate Instructor Teacher of the Year award, and has been nominated for the Piper Professor Award and the Case Teaching Award. An SSSP/Aspire award recipient, he has received several research and development grants and served as director of the Sabal Palms Writing Project, a site of the National Writing Project, for four years. He has organized numerous professional development workshops for both classroom teachers and university faculty.