Second Language Maintenance Amongst Sojourner Saudi Families After Returning to Their Home Country

Abstract

This study explores the language planning efforts for English language maintenance employed by sojourning Saudi families after returning to their home country. The study concludes that the importance of English in the development of different sectors in Saudi Arabia and the advantages of bilingualism in economic, health, and cognitive aspects for children played a significant role in the families’ language planning decisions. The study showed that the mothers maintained and developed their children’s English through following planned language strategies. A focus group discussion and semi-structured interviews illustrated that the mothers used four main strategies, which are speaking English exclusively at home, watching English television shows, maintaining relationships with English native speakers, and playing online educational games in English. The findings of this research study contribute to achieving understanding of sojourner families’ L2 maintenance efforts after returning to their home countries when those are monolingual countries such as Saudi Arabia.The study close with recommendations for future research to further develop this field of research.

Role of Primary School in Promoting Media Education and English Language Skills for Students

“…Students also have a passion for learning English words to understand the conversations they hear through YouTube, and English programs, especially through mobile phones (Vimochana, et al, 2023), (Raj & Baisel, 2024). Parents' encouragement of students to learn English helped enhance the role of primary school in students' acquisition of English language skills (Alshammari, 2024). It can also be explained that listening skills for short sentences were ranked first in the listening skills axis by saying that students prefer to listen to sentences that convey an integrated meaning, more than listening to single words, and this is consistent with a study (Carmen et al, 2024).…”

“…The results of the fourth question can be interpreted that media education contributed to enhancing both listening and speaking skills in English for primary school students, as teachers reported that media education and school Radio contributed to the students' passion for listening to English words, short and long sentences, and repeating the words they heard. This may be due to the primary school's keenness to teach students English language skills, especially through school Radio, and this is consistent with a study (Alshammari, 2024). The teachers encourage the students to learn the English language.…”

“…This confirms the importance of using digital applications to provide students with listening and speaking skills, especially mobile phone applications that help students repeatedly hear English terms, which enhances their ability to speak English as a foreign language (Raj & Baisel, 2024). Watching English television programs also helps children learn the English language (Alshammari, 2024).…”

“…Ainagul, Natalya, Anna, Arailym, & Bota (2023) examined the use of multimedia and media technologies in english language lessons as a means of increasing student motivation. Alshammari (2024) found that maintaining the English language of children in families was through mothers speaking English to them at home, watching english television programs, maintaining relationships with native english speakers, and playing online educational games in English.…”