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Programme: accepted abstracts

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Abstract ID: 457

Part of General Poster Session (Other abstracts in this session)

Dynamics of social representations and mobility in France

Authors: MOHAMMED, SHIHAB
Submitted by: MOHAMMED, SHIHAB (UNIVERSTY DE FRANCHE COMTE BESANCON, France)

This research concerns the evolution of social representations of Kuwaiti students, who received scholarships from their government to follow university studies in France.

Our research based on studies of verbal interaction related to “interactional sociolinguistics” (Gumperz, 1989, Hymes, 1974). This will allow us to describe and analyze the selected social representations of our chosen group.     

A description of the social image of the French world that the Kuwaiti community has, and the sociolinguistic context of Kuwait is a must to allow us to understand the socio-cultural and linguistic formation of our group.

We formulate our question as follows:  temporary immigration influences and transforms the social representations of Kuwaiti students.

For this study we use two criteria that of time and space in order to formulate our hypothesis:

• The major factors for changing social representations are to be found in the psychological, sociological and cultural context.
• A high level of linguistic and communicational competence facilitates the assimilation of another culture.  

Our methodology is a qualitative approach and composed of semi-directed interviews concerning our chosen subjects: France, French people and French language. Our selected group is composed of sixteen persons, divided into four sub-groups of four persons. The four groups were structured as follows: the first group was of students who had just arrived in France. The second group had been in France for a long time. The third group had finished their studies and had gone back to Kuwait. The last one called the “control group”: people who had never travelled to France. This structure follows a model of research presented by Labov (1966) and called “apparent time”.

In our analyses we will first of all, compare the different social representations and detect the changes in them and then analyze the collected data of conversations.

Bibliography:

-          BOYER H., (1996), SOCIOLINGUISTIQUE : TERITOIRE ET OBJET, Paris, Delachaux et niestlé

-          BOYER H., (2003), DE L’AUTRE COTE DU DISCOURS, Paris, HARMMATAN

-          GUMPERZ  J. (1989), SOCIOLINGUISTIQUE INTERACTIONNELLE, Paris, Harmattan

-          HYMES D., (1973) VERS LA COMPETENCE DE COMMUNICATION, Paris, LAL

-          JODELET D. (1989), LES REPRESENTATIONS SOCIALES, Paris, PUF

-          LABOV W., (1993), SOCIOLINGUISTIQUE, Paris, LE SENS COMMUN