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

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis 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.