An Investigation of Social Factors in Children’s Foreign Language Learning—A Case Study of Taiwanese Elementary School Students

HTML  XML Download Download as PDF (Size: 299KB)  PP. 105-119  
DOI: 10.4236/ojml.2015.52010    6,493 Downloads   9,787 Views  Citations
Author(s)

ABSTRACT

Social factors are believed to play a crucial role in language learning and have a major impact on second/foreign language proficiency (Ellis, 2003). The study was conducted to investigate Taiwanese children’s English learning motivation/attitude and the impacts of social factors of age, gender and social class on their English learning. Participants were 520 students from 6 elementary schools near Tainan City, divided into two groups as Urban Group (N = 271) and Rural Group (N = 249) based on their schools’ location. All were arranged to fill out a questionnaire dealing with their background and English learning motivation/attitude (Gardner, 1985). All available data were processed by SPSS 17.0 for descriptive, correlation, ANOVA, and predictive analyses. It was expected that the findings could provide more understanding about how social factors affect children’s second/foreign language learning, and to unlock the potential of the rural students when it comes to the tenth year of the official implementation of English teaching in Taiwanese elementary schools.

Share and Cite:

Hou, Y. (2015) An Investigation of Social Factors in Children’s Foreign Language Learning—A Case Study of Taiwanese Elementary School Students. Open Journal of Modern Linguistics, 5, 105-119. doi: 10.4236/ojml.2015.52010.

Copyright © 2024 by authors and Scientific Research Publishing Inc.

Creative Commons License

This work and the related PDF file are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.