Les Histoires Courtes Part I: The Economist’s View

Way back in April and May, I had my terminal (senior) students write short stories that I would later correct and return with feedback in a timely (not so timely) manner. There were practical reasons for doing so. Most short stories are written in the past tense. So doing this gave me an opportunity to see how they would fare. There were mixed results, some students nailing the past tense, others sticking to the present simply because they couldn’t produce the past tense, and still others who went back and forth because they knew to the use the past tense, but were not always successful in remembering some of the more difficult irregulars. Another practical reason was to see the range of their vocabulary. When learning a foreign language, it’s hard to know what kind of vocabulary you’re missing until you start talking about something and realize that you don’t quite know how to say it in your target language. When this occurs, there are generally four strategies a language learner uses.

First, the language learner limits or changes the idea because he/she can’t express it in the target language. This means that the student may only give part of a complex opinion or say something not completely true concerning preference or in the description of an event because there is a gap in vocabulary. Second, one can use circumlocution which is a process of tiptoeing around the word one wants to use but doesn’t know how translate. I learned this strategy in high school and find that it is the most useful when you’re speaking with someone who doesn’t have much working knowledge of your mother tongue. Essentially, you describe the word over and over in a variety of contexts with the hope that your listener will finally understand what you’re trying to say and then give you the proper word. Third, if the person you’re speaking with knows your mother tongue, then just supplement the word in the sentence. I use this most frequently in Malagasy. When I’m speaking Malagasy and don’t know a word, I just throw in the French word hoping the person I’m talking to catches the French word without stopping the conversation. The final strategy is just to look up the word you’re missing in the moment. It’s awkward in conversation, and I am very guilty of doing so with no shame. And it’s less awkward when writing because you typically have more time. As expected, there was evidence of all these strategies in the writings of my students ranging from the topics they chose to the vocabulary used, whether consistently or inconsistently. The fact of the matter is that whether a student wants to write about something more creatively or not, if the student lacks the vocabulary, it can be painstakingly difficult to write about the desired topic if one has to continuously search up new words. Consequently, a student may write about something they didn’t really want to write about, but at least has the vocabulary to do so.

I’m also guilty of this. For my final Malagasy lesson, I had to do a presentation on any topic I wanted. I chose to talk about my life story, not because it was interesting or what I really wanted to talk about, but because I knew all the vocabulary already and I didn’t feel as if I had the time to learn new and more difficult vocabulary for the sake of discussing something else. Such is the struggle of learning a new language.

Anyways, I was quite impressed with many of their stories. So much so, that I wanted to share some of them with you. Have no fear, I’ve received permission from the original authors to share some of their stories with you. In fact, I told them about my blog and then requested their explicit permission. Many of them were kind of surprised, for a multitude of reasons, but were also very open to the idea of me taking interest in their short stories. That, and the majority just didn’t care because it’s not like you will ever meet any of them, let alone find them in the ocean that is Malagasy Facebook.

I have divided the blog in two parts. In this blog, I will discuss the generalities and commonalities between the themes, topics, ideas, and other patterns I discovered. In the second blog, I will share some specific stories that I thought were entertaining, touching, or just bizarre. For now, let’s talk numbers and patterns.

Being the economist I am, I knew that if I was going to report about consistent themes, topics, ideas, and other patterns, I had better bring some numbers to back up my claims. Ergo, prepare thyself for a wave of statistical and data-driven information that you may gladly skip. My feelings, if they existed, will not be harmed.

While correcting the papers, I kept track of generalities to see if I could learn something. What I found was rather interesting and telling.

To begin, it is important to note that I did not give my students much of a guideline. I did tell them that a good story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. I told them that a good story answers the questions who, what, when, where, why, and how. And I asked them, “what do you want your story to say?” What is the main idea, theme, topic, moral, or lesson you want to share? Students were given the full class period to write a one-page story or about any topic they chose. The story could be real, made up, in the future, or in the past. On the other hand, they could write about whatever they wanted, as long as it was one-page in length and in English, preferably with a title. Needless to say, there was a variety of topics and stories, and sometimes some common themes or ideas. Some classes were more creative than others. And still, there was a lot of repetition of basic language, which refers to the aforementioned strategy of “sticking to what you know” when it’s hard to express what you actually want to say in your target language.

To help with my analysis, I created 11 different categories to help me break down the stories. They are as follows:

• Tradition: The story contains some kind of reference to Malagasy tradition, whether in historical terms or contemporary terms.

• Animal: The story contains a reference to or is about an animal of any kind.

• Childhood: The story refers to the student’s childhood or is about the childhood of another person or character.

• Family: The story contains information about or involves an activity with the student’s family.

• Friend: The story refers to a friend or is about a friend of the student.

• Religion: The story contains a spiritual or religious reference which includes mythological religions or legends.

• Fairytale: The story is a fairytale, fable, or some other kind of story intended to teach a moral or lesson to children.

• Dream: The story contains aspirations of the student whether that is a personal aspiration or a general aspiration about society or a macro topic.

• Tragedy: The story contains a tragic event or refers to something bad that happens.

• Trip: The story is about or refers to a vacation the student had.

• School: The story references school, studies, or education.

As I read through the stories and corrected them, I ticked off how a story matched these categories. For example, if a student wrote about home life and included a pet, I would tick off “family” and “animal”. If the story was a fable about a dog or a cat, I would tick off “fairytale” and “animal”, and perhaps I would include “tradition” if it were specific to Madagascar. You get the idea. Here’s what the data says.

The chart is easy enough to read. Of the 82 stories across 6 different classes I read, 17 of them had something tradition related, 14 animal, 22 childhood, 36 family, 9 friend, 19 fairytale, 28 dream, 33 tragedy, 12 trip, and 15 school. It is interesting to note that none of the categories exceeds 50%, which means no category was in a majority of the stories. However, the highest categories are “family” and “tragedy” which I found interesting. This could reflect two things. First, Malagasy culture is extremely family oriented. There is an emphasis on family-life and living together. Vocabulary about family is also taught first when learning a new language because it is often easy to talk about your family. So alternatively, they could “just be going with what they know”. The other highest frequency, that of tragedy also kind of surprised me. There was a surprising amount of death, whether an actual death of a friend or of a parent or of imaginary characters. The Fairytales had a lot of sad or unfortunate endings. There were at least two stories that involved kidnapping. And two explicitly mention either being an orphan or telling the story about an orphan.

The category with the lowest frequency is religion. Two were explicitly about faith. One about finding Jesus and another about Ramadan and how much the student loves his Islamic faith. The other religious stories included made up worlds or myths about Greek gods. When I read the line “in the age of Greek gods” I was a little surprised. It seemed out of place to me to see something from another culture thousands of miles away. Nonetheless, the short story about these Greek gods was rather entertaining and fit very well into the category of legend, myth, or even cosmogony.

The second most infrequent category was “friends” which was interesting because 60% of these stories about friends came from a single class. This means that although friends was an infrequent topic generally, its frequency was concentrated in that one class, TL2. Moreover, 86% of that same class mentioned family and 57% of the same class mentioned a trip or vacation. Oftentimes, it was about a family vacation to the countryside or another popular destination in Madagascar. It should also be noted that this class has the weakest English skills of all my students. Therefore, it could be conjectured that there is an unusually high frequency concentrated in these topics because they are the topics the students are most familiar with. Alternatively, they don’t have the language skills to talk about anything else, very similar to my own Malagasy presentation. That same class also had no stories related to traditions, religion, or fairytales, and very low frequency (nothing exceeding 21% and only averaging 14%) in any other category.

The other categories, Child (27%), Dream (34%), and Fairytale (23%), were interesting to read as they usually had some kind of little moral lesson or some kind of aspiration like getting a good job, using technology responsibly, helping others in Madagascar, etc. None of these categories were concentrated in a single class.

There are plenty of other interesting patterns I noticed. But I will limit them after this next. Of the 6 classes, half of them had stories containing all of the categories. The class with the lowest diversity of categories heavily concentrated its themes in “Dream” and had the lowest frequency of “Family” of all 6 classes and no frequency in “Tragedy”. This particular class was also the last class to write for me. Their English level is not as low as the TL2, which is the class previously mentioned. However, this class had recently been preparing for their exams where they were expected to write about technology and some other technical topics. Needleless to say, these were the most common topics in “Dream” from that class.

Anyways, that is my brief economic study of my students’ short stories. I found the patterns interesting and revealing. They speak volumes of how students and language learners approach challenges and opportunities. It also supports the notion that one can desire to be creative, but if one does not have the skills or knowledge to express that creativity, they are limited in self-expression. It goes back to the idea that language is not only the way we communicate, but also a form of self- and collective expression and universal understanding. The greater mastery you have of a language, the greater understanding you will have of the world around you. If you are in a place where you are unable to express yourself in a way that you normally do (such as through language), you are naturally limited in your ability to be yourself, sometimes having to assume a different kind of personality. The students who had more control of the English language were afforded the opportunity to express themselves creatively. Those students whose language skills were weak or undeveloped were limited in what they could express.

This obviously does not mean that this was absolutely the case. However, there is strong evidence that my conjectures are true, or at least partially true. The themes and topics of my students’ stories also reveal what they value. Family, friends, experiences, dreams, traditions. They are all important to my students. Some of them were very creative. Others revealed tragedies about their lives that I had not expected. In short, I was pleasantly surprised and enjoyed many of their stories. Soon I will share with you a few of these stories now that I have laid to rest the extremely unnecessary process that I just subjected you to endure. Below is the table in case you’re interested in some of the data. To read the chart, the class is on the far left column and each percentage refers to what percentage of that class included that category in their stories. For example, for the TL1 class, 30% of the class included traditions in their stories whereas only 4% of that class included trips or vacations.

As always, know that you are in my prayers each morning. All I ask is that you do the same for me.

May God be praised.