Parental factors in children’s motivation for learning English: a case in China

AbstractSchools in China and elsewhere are starting to teach English as a second language or foreign language (FL) to students at increasingly earlier ages. Although young learners (YLs), due to their developmental stage, are likely to be particularly susceptible to the influence of parents, parents’ roles in YLs’ motivation to learn English as an FL is not well understood. Moreover, we don’t fully understand why YLs lose their motivation to learn English by their upper elementary school years. Using self-determination theory, this study examined how parents’ socio-economic status (SES) and behaviours and beliefs about their children’s English education influenced children’s motivation to learn English in China. The participants were 198 fourth-, 191 sixth- and 183 eighth-grade students and their parents. Data were gathered using a series of surveys distributed to all the students and their parents, as well as interviews with 96 focus group students. Parents had substantial but varying influences on their children’s motivation, depending on their SES backgrounds and their children’s grade level. Whereas higher SES parents adjusted their behaviours according to their children’s changing needs, lower SES parents tended to remain controlling and often failed to foster their children’s self-competence and self-determined motivation. Higher SES parents’ abilities to provide their children with greater opportunities to use English outside of school were increasingly advantageous for the children’s development of self-determined motivation as their grade level increased.Keywords: young learnersforeign language educationparentssocio-economic status (SES)motivationself-determination theory Notes1. In C-City, first- to sixth-grade students belong to elementary schools and seventh- to ninth-grade students belong to secondary schools.2. The original survey for the longitudinal project included other motivation items such as items concerning peer-oriented motivation and anxiety. But they were beyond the scope of the present study and were excluded from the analyses here.3. SDT predicts that extrinsic motivations vary in the degree of autonomy, and thus it divides them into four subtypes. However, the present study did not examine the students’ external motivation at the subtype level because, as far as YLs are concerned, it is not clear to what extent these subtypes of extrinsic motivations should be treated as independent constructs. For example, Carreira (Citation2012) examined Japanese elementary school students’ motivation based on the SDT. Her exploratory factor analysis indicated that identified regulation and introjected regulation (i.e. two sub-types of extrinsic motivations in SDT) were not separate constructs. As one can see in Appendix, our extrinsic motivation items were primarily instrumental in nature; focusing on instrumental aspects of motivation was in line with the previous studies among YLs such as Nikolov (Citation1999) and Carreira (Citation2006).4. The students’ pseudonym initials are used.5. There was a code-switch here.