Correlation Between Family Cultural Factors And Junior Middle School Students' English Learning Achievements

The difference of students' achievements can be due to intellectual and nonintellectual factors.Non-intellectual factors include learning motivation,personalities,family background,social and cultural environment.They all play an indispensable part.Because non-intellectual factors have direct relation with students' learning environment,learning concept and their thinking mode,family background therefore becomes a very important factor affecting students learning behavior.Scholars home and abroad have studied a lot in this field from sociological perspective.Although they have quite a lot of research findings in the quantitive research of family background to students learning achievements,they didn't take many cultural factors into consideration.Therefore,this study is to explore the correlation between junior middle school students' English learning achievements and their family cultural factors.In the investigation,Subjects are two classes in junior grade one randomly selected from Huangshi middle school.There are two instruments used in the study—a questionnaire,which is designed to investigate subjects' family cultural background and an interview,which is designed to find out the reasons for subjects' low or high English achievements.The investigation is carefully designed and objectively analyzed.Two facets investigated are family cultural background and family economic background.Five research questions are proposed after a review of related studies both at home and abroad.These questions are concerning the influence of parents' educational background,family English learning environment,parents' English educating ideas and patterns,parents' cultural contributions,and family economic background on their students' English learning achievements.All the questions are answered subsequently.Findings after the investigation: 1)Family cultural background is proved to have great influence on middle school students' English learning achievements.2)The parents' educational background has positive relation to their students' English learning achievements.The higher the parents' degree is,the higher the students' English learning achievements are.Besides,the influence of fathers' educational background on students' English learning achievements is greater than that of mothers'.3)Family educational ideas are also very important.Fathers' family English educating ideas and patterns are much more important than those of mothers in improving middle school students' English learning.4)Family English learning environments has some influence on the students' achievements: the more time the parents spent with their children watching English programs or listening to English radio programs,the higher their achievements are.5)The parents' attention is also a very important factor.The more parents' attention paid to their children,the better their school performance is.6)Family cultural background can influence students' English learning but it cannot determine their English learning achievements.Junior middle school students' English learning achievements are an outcome both from the internal and external factors of students.