Response to Siskin: Fear of French, Fear of Otherness?

Since I responded to other people's posts before writing my own, I feel like I am going to repeat a lot of what I am about to say - ironically, reading other posts on the same article first helped me gather my thoughts better concerning the questions we have to ask ourselves after reading this article.



I discussed primarily the influence of socio-political perceptions (especially negative) of the French as a people, and how that perception, which is at its root purely social, spills over into the category of the linguistic. For me, it truly is a curious phenomenon - that the appeal of a language can be determined in large part to the appeal of the people that speak the language to begin with. I found particular evidence of this idea on page 52, in which Siskin et al. poses the question:



"Do many Americans decide against studying a language based on some half-hidden fears of otherness [...]?"



Also, on page 58, it is written that both learners of Spanish and French (though certainly not all) characterize French (the language) in the following way: French for some is "found ... to be unappealing, associating it with such words as arrogance arrogant, elite, elitism, [etc. ...]. Our quantitative data also revealed that over a third of Spanish students and approximately a quarter of French students perceived French-speaking people as rude."



Coincidence? I think not ;) In my opinion, the two are inherently and inextricably linked.



So, along with all the other factors that must be taken into account, and which this article mentions in great detail (even though it is a small sample size of subjects) I think that as citizens of the most powerful country in the world, our media (newspapers, news, radio, etc.) and our never-ending (and inevitable) political involvement in all parts of the world has a tendency to highly influence what we think of other countries, people, and their respective languages.



How do we address this problem of appeal, then, with all of this in mind? This is where cultural education comes into play (especially making cross-cultural comparisons and promoting cross-cultural awareness), and becomes just as important as the actual learning of the language alone. If we as teachers of French could get students to perceive the French differently, perhaps the learning of the language wouldn't appear to be as daunting, and the language itself perceived less negatively. If we want to attack these negative perceptions of the French language, we need to "creuser au fond" with the students the France that they don't know or are simply unaware of. Even if the French culture for some students is not fully understood, awareness is still a major step forward... and you certainly need awareness before you can fully digest and understand a foreign culture. Either way, it's progress... and in the end, it all simply comes down to perceptions, which, more often than not, are not reflective of reality.