nvestigating English Language Contribution to Cultural Identity Construction.

Abstract

Since the chief target of sociolinguistics is to explore the interpretational bond between language and society, the current research work investigates the relationship between language and identity. Hence, our objective is to scrutinize the impact of learning a foreign language on identity construction among third year English students at Ibn Khaldoun University of Tiaret. Accordingly, a mixed method is used by adopting both qualitative and quantitative methods in order to obtain reliable data. Besides, observing the behaviour of the target population, a structured interview with six questions conducted with six teachers of English at the same settings. In addition to this, a questionnaire distributed to our sample, which is composed of one hundred students. The overall of the findings confirm our suggested hypotheses, they revealed that language and identity are strongly interrelated and learning a foreign language shapes the identity by influencing the learners’ behaviour, attitudes, way of speaking, and thinking. Yet, they disprove, to some extent one of our hypotheses since not all foreign language learners imitate the western culture and deviate from their own. Eventually, learning a foreign language does not always mean losing cultural identity, however, it leads to the change of some of its aspects which makes preserving it mandatory.