Chinese Parents' Beliefs About Children's English Language Learning

Beliefs about language learning have attracted much research attention in recent years.As an important influential factor to second language learning,parents' beliefs about children's language learning have been claimed to have great impacts on their involvements of children's language learning and so as to influence children's language learning behaviors and outcomes.However,relevant studies are few in our country and little is known about the issue of primary school students' parents' beliefs about children's English learning.So it is of great significance to conduct such a research.The present study aims to investigate the beliefs about children's English learning of Chinese primary school students' parents and the contributive factors to the formation of their beliefs.Based on the review of the previous studies,two research questions have been put forward:(1)What are the beliefs about children's English learning of Chinese primary school students' parents?(2)What are the factors that influence parents' beliefs about children's English learning? A mixed method of quantitative and qualitative study was adopted in present research.A survey with questionnaires and interviews were conducted for data collection.Two hundred student's parents of two public primary schools in Beijing participated in the survey,and three parents and two English teachers participated in the interview.The questionnaire used in the present study was adapted from Horwitz(1988)'s “Beliefs about Language Learning Inventory”,abbreviated as BALLI.One hundred and ninety three completed questionnaires were returned.The preliminary data cleaning revealed that 171 questionnaires were valid.To verify and compliment the questionnaire findings,two focused-group interviews were conducted with three parents and two primary school English teachers as the participants respectively.Statistical analysis was applied to the data.Methods adopted include: descriptive analysis employed to describe the parents' general beliefs about children's language learning;Independent samples t-test,One-way Anova analysis and Pearson Correlational analysis deployed to find the factors that influence parents' beliefs about children's English learning.Besides,based on the questionnaire findings,two self-designed interview protocols were applied to the interviews of students' parents and English teachers respectively.Research findings suggest that:(1)Parents' strongest belief about children's language learning associated with the dimension of “motivation and expectations(ME)”.Parents tend to hold a positive attitude towards the motivation and expectations to children's language learning.The parents' motivation for their children to learning English is rather instrumental in current study.(2)Parents' weakest belief goes to the dimension of “the difficulty of language learning(DLL)”.They tend to hold a neutral attitude toward the difficulty of English learning which reflects that parents take English as a language of medium difficulty.(3)Regarding the foreign language aptitude(FLA),parents generally endorse the concept of foreign language aptitude,but they don't believe their children have specialized abilities for language learning.(4)In terms of the nature of language learning(NLL),parents' central concern goes to the significance of learning English in an Englishspeaking country,which reflects they underlines the authentic and immersive linguistic environment.(5)Concerning the communication and learning strategies(CLS),parents strongly underscore the importance of repeat and practice.Additionally,the results revealed that parents' education background,parents' birthplace,parents' age,children's grade and parents' self-perceived English competence have impacts on their beliefs about children's English learning.In a word,the present study shed some light on Chinese parents' beliefs about children's English learning,and offered parents,English teachers as well as educators some constructive suggestions and enlightenment in understanding the motivations of children's English learning and the familial and social influential factors.