Voicing Self-worth: a Cross-language Examination of Self-esteem and Body Satisfaction

Abstract Book of the 10th International Conference on Future of Teaching and Education

Year: 2025

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Voicing Self-worth: a Cross-language Examination of Self-esteem and Body Satisfaction

Leonor Juárez García, María Lilia López López

ABSTRACT:

Self-esteem and body satisfaction are complex and multidimensional constructs, mainly studied from psychological areas and roughly approached from language educational perspectives. This deficiency has created invisibility of the impacts of these phenomena in these and other instructional spaces, for example in foreign language training. This study attempts to shed some light on this issue. It aims to describe and compare indicators of self-esteem, body satisfaction and physical appearance in two foreign language training programs in a higher education institution in central México. The study focuses on the perceptions of eighty-eight foreign language trainees, forty-four English and forty-four French trainees. Following a quantitative method, the study reports statistical data and examines rates and associations. As part of a larger research on lookism, this is a data driven study. Information was collected by means of an adapted written survey administered during face-to-face lessons. Descriptive statistics suggest participants´ foreign language may sensitively influence body satisfaction perceptions. Itemized inferential outcomes indicate specific language expressions that significantly mark trainees’ fellowship. Detailed operational variables may offer a nuanced agenda to better understand and manage these psycho-social phenomena from the foreign language teaching and learning area.

Keywords: Education, Self-Concept, Perceptions