Situating Language Learning in Study Abroad

Abstract

In his 1986 autobiographical novel L’étudiant étranger (The Foreign Student), the French journalist and cineaste Philippe Labro recreates and embellishes his college study abroad experience. During the mid-1950s the novel’s 18-year-old protagonist leaves France for a year to become an exchange student in the United States. His destination is a rural college for ‘gentlemen’ located in central Virginia where the White population clings both to antebellum customs of discreet propriety and to its legacy of racial prejudice and segregation. Alternately terrified and thrilled to the core, the young man is plunged into an alternative universe where everything seems new to him, from language, to modes of social organization, to colors of the natural landscape. Eager to blend in, he decides that the best way to learn will be to participate as actively as possible while pretending to have understood not only words, but also gestures, clothing, grooming, flavors, and quotidian pursuits. He shortly discovers that the meanings of linguistic signs are richly intertwined with social convention, sensual experience, and implicit ideologies of gender and race.