This paper examines the effects and significance of using fiction when heritage language learners( (Kagan & Dillon, 2008) talk about themselves. Many heritage speakers begin learning at a young age at the behest of their parents. Still, many stop learning once they have achieved a minimum level of communication due to the language's difficulty or lack of interest.　While the heritage language increases feelings of closeness with parents and relatives (Fishman, 2001), heritage language learners are not familiar with the cultural background behind the language, so they cannot express their thoughts in the language with ease. Furthermore, the heritage language does not usually affect academic performance. For these reasons, it is difficult for these learners to continue learning the heritage language. However, there are also positive aspects to these points. Learning a heritage language makes it possible to create a rich expression as a hybrid of multiple cultures, with the potential to construct unique perceptions and identities. Also, the fact that it is not related to academic ability means that more free expression is allowed without worrying about the evaluation criteria of authority figures. From this perspective, the presenter has recently held language arts workshops several times at a Japanese-Canadian heritage language school in Canada. The workshop aims to help participants to increase their self-worth as heritage language learners and to realize the richness of having a mixed culture. In this paper, I will focus on a few cases that emphasize fictional elements in the works produced in a workshop that uses Kamishibai, a multimedia performance that combines pictures and words, to talk about past, present, and future lives, and consider the role of fictional elements in personal narratives. Fiction is a product of the imagination (Vygotsky, 1930; Rodari, 1990). It is rooted in make-believe play (Walton, 1990), inherent in everyone. Fiction is thought to be at the core of "aesthetic literacy," which is the ability to perceive things from multiple perspectives, respond emotionally, and create new meanings. Chapman (1990), who teaches children how to write plays, says that fantasy is not an escape from reality, but an exploration of the human psyche, and that fantasy is a way of analyzing reality, and that fantasy is even the essence of the real world. As inheritors of languages with different cultural backgrounds, heritage language learners are in an environment that promotes aesthetic literacy, as they encounter situations that require them to reexamine a single thing from multiple perspectives.

The workshop was conducted as an ABR aimed at helping participants recognize the uniqueness and richness of their own identities as individuals living in two cultures—the first language and the heritage language. To avoid limiting children's expressive abilities, the workshop employed the paper drama method, which combines storytelling with illustrations. Additionally, participants were encouraged to depict themselves not as their real selves but as fictional protagonists, thereby increasing the freedom of expression. Fiction is said to enhance the possibility of accessing the inner world of characters (Leavy, 2023). In November 2023, the art-based workshop was held for ten 9th-grade Canadian English speakers who attend a local school in an English-speaking area on weekdays and a Japanese heritage language school on Saturdays to learn Japanese. Participation in the workshop was voluntary, and a document explaining the workshop's purpose was distributed to each family in advance. Children who wished to participate submitted a consent form in advance. The workshop consisted of the participants introducing themselves, an ice-breaker, an explanation of how to make a paper drama, a demonstration of the completed paper drama, and a review. It lasted for about 2 hours and 40 minutes. Paper drama is a traditional Japanese theatrical technique incorporating multimedia, such as words and visual information. It is a type of folk theater in which a drama of multiple scenes is told while showing pictures of each scene. It is said that drama production is effective for language learning, stimulates aesthetic literacy, and improves self-esteem, but not only is it extremely time-consuming to produce and perform a drama with multiple people (Ishiguro, 2022), but it is also difficult to fully grasp the thoughts of each producer and performer from the completed drama. In contrast, paper drama can be created relatively quickly and performed by a single person, so it is easy for the author's intentions and worldview to be reflected in the work. When the author and performer of a paper drama are the same person, the way the paper shows the scene moves and the effect of the voice's rhythm provides visual, linguistic, and rhythmical information to the audience simultaneously, making it a multimedia-like activity.

Except for two incomplete final works, eight created stories were analyzed for structure, content, and the storyteller's position. Three types of storytelling structures were found: chronological sequence (3 cases), beginning-development-turn-conclusion sequence (2 cases), and episode focusing (1 case). Chronological sequence is a composition method that shows what happened chronologically in order from birth. The beginning-development-turn-conclusion sequence is a story structure method commonly taught in Japanese school education and used in the manga. Episode focusing refers to a method of focusing on a single episode. It can be considered part of the chronological expression method since it extracts and depicts a scene from the past. The content of the stories told in the paper drama was found to be non-fiction (4 cases) and fiction (2 cases) that told facts about themselves, as well as hybrid content that included both (1 case). The author's positioning in the story was confirmed. In five cases, the author appeared in the first person as "I." In two cases, the author was considered to be in the position of a narrator with a bird ' s-eye view of the whole story by making "someone other than me" the main character and making the story third person. Based on the above analysis, this report presents a detailed analysis of three cases that were considered highly fictional. The "person" or "event" appearing in the fiction becomes a fictional actor or event that has no object of indication outside of its text (Walton, 1990), thus creating distance from the actual author or event. Therefore, the characters and events always constitute meaning only within intra-textual relations. So, narrating characters and events in a fictionalized story is more likely to reflect the author's thoughts and feelings. This point requires further theoretical and empirical investigation.

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