The Influence Of Family Background On The Chinese High School Students' English Achievements

Since the Reform and Opening-up policy was implemented in 1980s,English has been employed as a communication medium in many international situations.In the current education system in China,English is set as a compulsory course in the basic education.This thesis studies the influence of family background on the Chinese high school students' English achievements.The questionnaire investigation is carried out to obtain the students' English achievements as well as their family background.The sociological theories and the educational theories are adopted to analyze the questionnaire results.Based on the analysis,the causality of the students'English achievements can be classified into two categories,major causality as well as the minor causality.In the major causality part,the direct causal relationship between family background and academic performance of English are discussed.In this part,descriptive statistics approach is used to show the differences of English achievements of the students with different family backgrounds.The factors are horizontally compared to determine the major factor.It is concluded that the parents' occupation,the parents' educational level,and the family income all can affect the students' English achievement.In terms of the horizontal comparison,the contributing factor of the parents' educational level has the largest distribution range.It can be speculated that the effect of the parents' educational level is the most important factor among the three factors.In the minor causality part,the effects of several intermediary factors are investigated,including the extra-curricular factors,the study reference factors,and the parents' participation factors.All the factors are linked to the family background to reveal the mechanism.The extra-curricular factors can be treated as the combination of the extracurricular classes,the tutor,and the guidance of the parents.The research indicates that the family background can significantly affect the chances of joining tutorial English education and hiring private teachers.There exist significant effects of parents' occupation and parents' educational level on the parental guidance.Among them,the parental guidance can significantly improve the students'English achievement.The study reference factors include the reference books,and the electronic products.The relationship of the family background and the English achievement has been discussed to reveal the importance of the study reference factors.The parents' occupation and their educational level can affect the usage of reference books,dictionaries and the assistant software in the English education of the students.Compared with the labor workers and farmers,the technical personnel and management personnel are more receptive to cultural consumptions.Compared with the parents with low educational level,the parents with high educational level can enjoy more cultural consumptions.It is also indicated that the family income can affect the use of the reference books,dictionaries and the assistant software.Naturally,the reference books,dictionaries and the assistant software can significantly affect students' English achievement.The parents' participation factors can be divided into the concern level of English education,the educational environment and the educational expectation.All the parents' participation factors have been linked to the family background to reveal the effects of the parents'participation factors.The parents' occupation and the parents' educational level significantly affect their habitues of learning at home.Also,the parents' occupation and the parents'educational level can affect the expectation to their children.Finally,three policy suggestions are raised.The polarization effect of English education due to the family background should be noticed.