| This study investigates the perceptions of college-level American learners of French about the influence of instructed learning on their cultural assumptions concerning the French language and people. The study is framed on the theoretical notions of essentialization (Kubota, 2001), habitus (Bourdieu, 1982) and appropriation (Bakhtin, 1981). Students and teachers come to the FL classroom with essentialized (Kubota, 2001) impressions about the French language and people based on dispositions and categories that originate in their habitus. For Watson-Gegeo (2004), comparisons and confrontations between different practices, ideas and systems of representation are bound to occur during foreign language instruction, making cultural impressions and beliefs of others available for appropriation. The purpose of this study is to research whether these confrontations trigger or not an adjustment of learners' assumptions leading them to appropriate new assumptions. Data were collected during one semester, at a large American university. During the first and last week of classes, a questionnaire was given to 47 American students in four first-semester French classes with native speakers of English as instructors. Twenty-two students, randomly selected, were interviewed three times during the semester. The instructors were also interviewed at the end of the semester regarding their impressions on teaching French language and culture. I chose an interpretive approach based on adapted principles of grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) to analyze the data from the surveys and interviews. I determined the learners' impressions and images of the French language and people, and I examined how these assumptions were adjusted through instruction. I found that many learners' cultural assumptions were tied to national stereotypes and essentializations. Certain assumptions influenced how learners approached the foreign language learning situation, their desire to continue or not the study of French, as well as how they perceived and interpreted information received during instruction. Based on the findings in this study, I contend that, despite the integration of culture in the language curriculum, foreign language instruction may have a limited impact on learners' pre-existing assumptions about the target language and culture, because many learners perceive foreign language study to be the acquisition of linguistic skills only. |
