Inspecting American Cultural Hegemony from a Linguistic Standpoint: Young Learners’ Attitudes towards English

Abstract

The course of this work aims at studying American cultural hegemony on the Algerian young generation from a linguistic standpoint. The American cultural influence has, in fact, brought up indirectly the language alongside culture. It comes into sight that interest in English is growing conspicuously though French remains the dominant foreign/second language. Hence, this work inspects attitudes towards English among the Algerian youngsters. It also investigates reasons that define such attitudes. To achieve the research aims, the researcher opted for triangulation to cross-validate the findings. A questionnaire in addition to semi-structured interviews were employed with secondary school learners. The findings of the study confirmed students’ positive attitudes towards English and their passion to learn such language. The main reason beyond such attitudes is that English is perceived as the language of international communication. As such, knowledge of English permits overcome the language barrier making contact with different world populations easier than any other language.