Parents’ Educational Level and Children’s English Language Proficiency

Abstract

The expansion of the English Language utilization, the concept of Lingua Franca, and the English language proficiency’s role in children’s social and vocational future, make children’s learning English a vital affair for parents all around the world. Minding the role of parents’ educational level is an understudied issue in children’s English language proficiency level. To address this unexpected topic, the purpose of this study is finding the relationship between parents’ educational level and children’s English language proficiency. For this study, the researcher gave a TOEFL test (for evaluating the children’s English language proficiency) and a questionnaire (for determining their parents’ educational level) to eighty participants both female and male who are in their twenties and thirties. They were students in Intermediate and Upper Intermediate level in Gatt Language Center (GLC) in Tehran. After collecting the data the researcher considered each participant’s score two times: First regarding to their fathers’ educational level, second regarding to their mothers’ educational level. The researcher ran Independent Sample t-Test for differentiation between children whose parents have university education and children whose parents do not have university education. This study showed that children whose mothers have university education have higher level of English language proficiency. But there is no significant difference of English language proficiency level between children whose fathers have university education and those whose fathers do not have university education. In accordance with this study, unlike fathers’, mothers’ educational level, especially university education, could affect children’s English language proficiency level. So all parents especially mothers who desire to have children with high English language proficiency level, should take the prominence of their own educational level into account.

Determinants of English Language Proficiency: A Multifaceted Analysis

“…According to the findings of the study, children's academic achievement is influenced by their family's educational level in terms of academic support, role modeling, worry, intellect, and motivating aspects [30]. The study by Jalili (2017) [31] supported that children whose mothers with a university degree have a better level of English language competence. Accordingly, the following hypothesis was proposed: Hypothesis 8: Learners' family educational support is positively related to the English language proficiency of PIM students according to the CEFR framework.…”

Foreign Language Learning via Online Modular Instruction and Related Variables: A Sequential Explanatory Study

“…Father's Education factor got an r-value of 0.140 and a p-value of 0.533, while the Mother's Education got an r-value of -0.223 and a p-value of only 0.318. The weak positive correlation between the father's education and the weak negative correlation between the mother's education refuted the study of Jalili (2017), where she stated that children whose mothers' had university education had a higher language proficiency. Table 10 shows that some fathers only go to formal schooling and are only elementary graduates, thus contradicting the study by Iwaniec (2020), where she emphasized that students with parents with a lower level of education tended to be less motivated in language learning compared to their peers from cities whose parents had a higher level of education.…”

“…Educators' ongoing innovations, combined with the active participation of other stakeholders, are the Variables related to foreign or second language learning have always been a subject of an investigation to improve instruction and acquisition. Several studies in the past have already identified internal or individual characteristics such as age, sex, attitude, motivation, personality, cognitive style, self-esteem and first language proficiency, as well as external factors like sociocultural status, family expectations, school curriculum and setup, and teacher, among others, as factors influencing language acquisition (Gardner & Lambert, 1972;Walberg, 1981;Skehan, 1989;Khasinah, 2014;Tsai & Wu, 2010;Mirhadizadeh, 2016;Jalili, 2017;Shabir, 2017;Sun, 2019;Iwaniec, 2020;Jones, 2013, as cited in Zhou, 2020Baskota & Shrestha, 2022). Each of these identified factors can be categorized under one of the six components identified by Elger as pivotal to performance.…”