Narrative Theory and Stories that Speak to Us - by Cynthia L. Selfe and the DALN Consortium
In the complicating action of his narrative, Yusuf reveals some of the emotional and personal costs associated with his struggle to learn English. Yusuf identifies himself as a competent language user in his homeland (“I spoke Swahili; I spoke Somali…”), but he notes, with a shake of his head, that English was difficult to learn (“English was just something different, something I never heard…”). Yusuf provides examples of the strategies he employed to learn English and to improve his language proficiency (“I used to watch American movies….I tried, you know, everything just to learn the word…”).
As he tells his story, Yusuf recalls a memorable middle school incident in which he fought another boy “…because he asked me something, and I thought he was cursing at me…” and, smiling ruefully, he remembers how he was called nicknames in English that he didn’t “even recognize.” With these anecdotes, Yusuf distinguishes his middle-school self both from native speakers of English and from his twenty-one-year-old self narrating the story.
