Deconstructing Cultural Stereotypes to Improve International Students' Interculturality: A Short-term Experimental Approach in a Malaysian Pre-France Programme

• Published in: International journal of bias, identity and diversities in education Vol. 1; no. 2; pp. 39 - 52
• Main Authors: Machart, Regis, Azzouz, Atafia
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Milwaukee IGI Global 01.07.2016
• Subjects: College students; Language skills; Multiculturalism; Social aspects; Stereotype (Psychology); Stereotypes; Students; United Kingdom; Malaysia; France; China; Germany
• ISSN: 2379-7363; 2379-7355
• DOI: 10.4018/IJBIDE.2016070104

Malaysian Pre-France programmes prepare Malaysian students to study at a French university. Students are prepared in intensive language courses, as well as mathematics and science in line with the French curriculum. The teaching staff members include French citizens and other nationals, native and non-native speakers, members of the ethnic minorities from France. Malaysia itself is a multicultural country and highly diverse in terms of language, ethnicity, religion, etc. The authors' expectations were that the convergence of these French-speaking lecturers with students from a ‘culturally' diverse environment would entail a certain form of fluidity in approaching the ‘culture' of the host destination. However, their experiences during the required DELF, a diploma awarded by the French Ministry of Education to prove the French-language skills of non-French candidates, demonstrate that the representations of France remain rather static and ‘traditional'. Such representations generate some anxiety for the students before they travel abroad. In an attempt to evaluate the impact of these representations and the students' readiness to meet ‘culturally different others', the authors conducted a small scale experiment with final semester students who were about to leave for France two months. They first administrated a questionnaire to 21 students for the purpose of revealing the students' latent representations of their host destination. The participants then followed a lecture in order to deconstruct their original representations, and asked to write a report in French on this experiment. Results show that the long-term exposure to ‘visible' diverse speakers has little effect on the participants in terms of moving away from cultural stereotypes, but that a relatively short but explicit intervention has a rather significant impact on the participants' representations. The authors conclude that only a pro-active, deconstructive and explicit course of action can enable learners to move away from widespread stereotypes, and that a fluid intercultural awareness on the part of lecturers is crucial.