PhD student in Second Language Acquisition
By the time Marie-Thérèse Jasperson came to UW–Madison as a doctoral student in the fall of 2022, she already had a long career working as a Hmong language consultant for school districts with Hmong bilingual education programs in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and California.
She had a master’s degree in education from Stanford and knew she wanted to pursue a PhD. But first, she took a break from school to start a family, raising four children. During this time, Thérèse helped schools develop language standards and instructional materials for Hmong education, as well as professional development for language teachers.
In her work, Thérèse became frustrated that a lot of the prevailing standards for Hmong language instruction aligned with English language standards. Thérèse said this is limiting in that many unique linguistic features exist in both Hmong and English, so using the same standards for both is not always culturally appropriate for Hmong language education.
“That’s the biggest disservice you can do to a language and to a group of people,” she said.
Twenty years after earning her master’s, Thérèse was inspired to come back to school for her PhD to conduct Hmong language research. A student in the Second Language Acquisition program, her research focuses on Hmong language and Hmong writing, which is a relatively new system implemented in 1953. Her work centers the need to address identity, culture, and epistemology — and how all of those aspects are reflected in a language — when creating Hmong bilingual education programs.
Thérèse’s family comes from Laos. They received political asylum in France in the 1970s and later immigrated to California in the 1990s. As a native Hmong speaker, Thérèse feels a sense of urgency in this work.
“Because the Hmong people are a stateless people, we feel the country through the way that we are, through the way that we live. And if we are not able to teach that to the younger generation and to future generations, they’re going to lose that identity,” she said. “Because [my generation is] still grounded in the culture and in the language, it’s our duty and responsibility to protect that. If you wait one more generation, we’re going to be displaced even further, and the gap is going to be wider.”
Thérèse emphasizes that her life experience in Hmong language teaching vital in her work as a scholar and researcher, allowing her to be able to truly connect the dots between theory and practice. Speaking with the benefit of hindsight, she’s glad she waited to start her PhD.
“I think it was a blessing in disguise that I took the time to raise my children, but also utilize that time for me to really grow and to develop this really strong connection with Hmong literacy,” she said.