Telling Good Stories In Different Languages

telling good stories in different languages

Americans of linguistically mainstream backgrounds had some difficulty in comprehending and reconstructing a Native American story that did not conform to their norm of a good story. Dube (1977) also confirmed the tendency that people more easily forget elements in stories taken from cultures that are dissimilar to their own than elements in stories from cultures similar to theirs. Furthermore, as was the case in the original Bartlett study (Bartlett, 1932), Harris, Lee, Hensley, and Schoen (1988) found that foreign stories read to Americans were likely to be “misremembered” to have been more like American stories.