Resultados multivariados

Students’ motivation to learn Arabic may have either a direct or an indirect relationship to their willingness to acculturate and adopt the new language with all of its cultural aspects, including religion. Research that has addressed students’ motivation for learning Arabic at the college level in the U.S. has revealed different reasons why students seek to learn Arabic. As Huseinlei (2006) argues, “Arabic learners’ orientations for studying Arabic can fall on a continuum rather than being characterized as either instrumental or integrative” (p. 406). Notably, the studies’ locations and whether they were performed before or after 9/11 seems to influence the findings.

Regardless of timing, however, one important outcome of this research is that the motivations of FLLs are clearly and significantly different from those of HLLs.

Learning about Arabic culture has been a goal for FLLs since before 9/11. Belnap (1987) surveyed 568 learners of Arabic as a foreign language in the U.S. and Canada, only 9 percent of whom were of Arab descent. In this study, the ranking of reasons for learning Arabic was the desire (1) to understand Arabic literature and culture; (2) to travel or live in an Arab country in the future; and (3) to communicate with Arab people. A small percentage (19.9 percent) of the respondents thought that learning Arabic might help them in their careers. Finally, an even smaller percentage (14.4 percent) wanted to learn Arabic for heritage reasons. In 2001, Kuntz and Belnap surveyed 71 students of Arabic at two study-abroad programs to investigate student beliefs about learning Arabic. They found that a large majority (80 percent) of learners believed in the significance of interaction and oral communication, i.e., they were learning Arabic in order to travel to Arab countries and be able to interact with Arabic native speakers. Nearly half of the respondents (47 percent) believed that Arabic would help them get a good job, and only 12

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percent were studying Arabic to fulfill degree requirements. Abuhakemah reported that 85 percent of students who enrolled in lower-to-intermediate classes at a highly rated Arabic Summer School immersion program at Middlebury College expressed a desire to learn how to socialize in Arabic, and 83 percent were interested in learning more about the politics of the Middle East (cited in Huseinlei, 2006).

The desire on the part of FLLs to travel to Arab countries and interact socially with the people there persisted after 9/11. Husseinali (2006) surveyed 120 American college students enrolled in a first- or second-year Arabic as a foreign language class – only 19 percent of them were classified as HLLs. He identified four major types of learner orientations: (1) “instrumental orientations,” i.e., getting a job or fulfilling degree requirements; (2) “political orientations,” i.e., understanding the politics of the Arab world and the Middle East; (3) “cultural identity

orientations,” i.e., relating to one’s own culture and heritage; and (4) “travel and world culture orientations,” i.e., understanding the Arab world’s culture (p. 402-3). The results of this study confirm previous findings: the majority of FLLs were motivated to study Arabic in order to understand the political scene of the Arab region, use Arabic in their travels, and/or meet new people. Moreover, 90 percent of learners in both HLL and FLL groups were highly interested in communicating with native speakers of Arabic. Most agreed that they were studying Arabic to “learn more about other cultures to understand the world better” (p. 401). Equally significant is that the majority of respondents agreed that Arabic is an important world language because of its relation to “Islam as a world religion,” its influence in literature, and its role in the global

economy (Husseinali, 2006, p. 401).

In contrast, another study reported negative attitudes about Arabic language and culture post-9/11. Taha (2007) administered a questionnaire to a sample of 142 students studying Arabic

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in a historically black university in the United States; the mix was 34 international graduate students and 108 American undergraduate students. The purpose of the study was to explore the attitudes, motivation, and perceptions of students regarding the teaching and learning of Arabic as a foreign language in the post-9/11 era. Results of the study indicate that, although most of the respondents agreed that learning Arabic is important for utilitarian purposes, they seemed

divided on its specific usefulness in their future careers. The two groups differed in their general perceptions of Arabic language and culture. Some students, especially in the undergraduate group, expressed mixed feelings and/or unfavorable opinions. One student even expressed skepticism about the intentions behind the increasing the number of Americans learning Arabic: “It seems to me the government is trying to make African-Americans learn Arabic so we can go overseas and fight against the Arabs” (Taha, 2007, p. 154). Overall, these results show a

difference in attitude between the international students, most of whom showed positive attitudes towards the Arabic language and culture); and American undergraduate students who showed mostly negative attitudes. For instance, in response to the statement, “learning Arabic as a foreign language is important to me because I like the language/culture” (p. 157), only one-fifth of American students agreed, about one-third were not sure, and almost half disagreed. In contrast, slightly more than half of the international students agreed, a little more than a quarter were not sure, and only one-fifth disagreed. Taha (2007) suggested a number of reasons for this divergence, including the likelihood that international students were better acquainted with different languages and cultures than American students, who tend to learn about them mostly in a classroom setting, and that perhaps American students were still harboring negative feelings about the Arab culture following the aftermath of 9/11 and/or the war in Iraq.

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motivation to learn Arabic. In a study investigating HLLs’ attitudes and motivation for learning Arabic, Seymour-Jorn (2004) interviewed Arab-American students at the University of

Wisconsin to examine their attachment to the Arabic language. Seymour-Jorn found that for most of the participants, Arabic is important for cultural identity reasons. Respondents expressed a belief that one cannot understand one’s culture without knowing Arabic. However, the

respondents were divided between those taking Arabic to be able to read and interpret the Quran and those who wanted to improve their reading and writing skills. Husseinali (2006) found that 74 percent of HLLs said that they were learning Arabic to be able to relate to their Islamic identity, and 66 percent said that they were learning Arabic because of their own Arab culture. According to Kono and McGinnis (2001), the motivation of HLLs is often quite different from that of FLLs because “many [HLLs] are dealing with deeply felt issues of identity, struggling to understand their relationship to their home culture and language, mainstream America, and perhaps other groups as well” (p. 199).

An additional dissimilarity is that FLLs are more motivated than HLLs in order to understand the world and the politics of the Middle East while more HLLs are motivated to understand the problems that Arabs face. Also, FLLs demonstrate more active instrumental motivation than HLLs because they want to get a job that requires knowledge of Arabic. HLLs, however, demonstrate passive instrumental orientation; they are more motivated than FLLs to learn Arabic in order to fulfill degree requirements (Husseilani, 2004, p. 403). In his study, Brosh (2013) found that “national threat” was one of the factors that urged his respondents, who were mainly FLLs, to learn Arabic. Brosh argues that “some students feel a greater sense of national threat due to changes in the sociopolitical context and they learn the language out of patriotism” (p. 34).

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The findings from this research make it clear that learning about Arab culture and understanding it, as in the case of FLLs, and relating to one’s own culture, as in the case of HLLs, are among the top reasons why students learn Arabic in the U.S. Yet many scholars have limited their research to focus on student motivation and have not examined how students experience the learning process and how they feel about it. Indeed, students’ motivation to learn Arabic may be affected by their attitudes toward the Arab culture after they begin study as well as before. This study explores the relationship between student attitudes toward Arab culture and their motivation for learning Arabic after they have begun to experience the teaching and

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CHAPTER 3