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.