3 research outputs found
Beer, Fast Cars, and ...: Stereotypes Held by U.S. College-Level Students of German
Foreign language educators generally agree that an important objective of foreign language
instruction is the lessening of preconceived stereotypical images regarding the target culture,
and a broadening of perspectives regarding humankind and its cultural diversity in general.
One would hope that with increasing fluency in a language, and increased exposure to
German speakers, authentic texts, and culture-specific contexts and information, students
would also develop an increasingly sophisticated and critical perspective of a country and its
people - a perspective which is based more on knowledge, observation, and critical of
present-day phenomena than on preconceived, simplistic stereotypical notions. Stereotypes,
however, are part of the human information processing system and as such are hard to avoid.
In the following, we will outline various theoretical explications of stereotype formation, and
then present the results of a study which investigates stereotypes held by U.S. students
vis-à-vis Germany and Germans. We will conclude with a brief discussion of the pedagogical
implications of stereotype formation based on insights from social psychology