Research On Family Background And Cultural Factors Influence Achievement Of Junior High School English

Besides the influence of intelligence, nonintellectual factors such as learning motivations, personality traits, family backgrounds as well as social and cultural environments also play indispensable roles in the differences of academic performances of students in school. Among all the nonintellectual factors, family background becomes a vital factor in affecting the academic behaviors of students because it is directly related to the students’ academic environments, learning philosophy and thinking patterns. Scholars from both domestic lands and foreign nations have conducted various researches in this field from the perspective of sociology. Although they have accumulated substantial research achievements in the quantitative researches of the impact imposed by family background on students’ academic performances, these researches tend to emphasize on variables of social and economic status of family, with little consideration on the "cultural factors" in family background. Therefore, by discussing the impact imposed by the family cultural background of family environment background on students’ academic performance, this research analyzes the relations between the family cultural background and the academic performances of junior high students. In this connection, on the basis of summing up and concluding the related document literature, this research refers to the investigation questionnaires of previous related researches, compiles the Questionnaire of Relations between English Performances&Family Cultural Backgrounds of Junior High Students, selects the ninth grade students in a junior high school under Kunming Iro n&Steel Holding Co., Ltd., and then logs, processes and analyzes the investigation data by using the statistical software such as Excel and SPSS17.0and the analytical methods of descriptive statistics and compare means. In the research, it was found that1) The academic performance of children from single-parent families was remarkably lower than those from two-parent families, and showed tendency of polarization;2) The education background of parents was positively related to the scores of their children, which means that the higher parents’ degree was, the higher children’s scores were; besides, the influence of fathers’ education background on children’s scores was greater than that of mothers’;3) Family education ideas had significant influence on students’ scores, and the overall lower scores of a student were related to the unscientific teaching ideas adopted by the parents; what’s more, the mother’s teaching method had greater influence on students’ performance than the father’s;4) Family English learning environment had certain effect on students’ performance:the more English materials in the family, the higher the students’ score; the longer time spent in watching English programs or listening to English radio programs, the higher the scores;5) The attention of parents was also an important influencing factor:the more attention parents paid to students’ study, the better their performance;6) Parents’ capacity in helping (tutoring and answering questions) students in study also has some influence on students’scores. At last, based on the research result, the author put forward suggestions from the perspectives of parents, teachers and schools to promote the cooperation between families and schools so as to improve students’ English performance.