The Influence of Parental Studying Abroad Experience & Language Environment on Children's Second Language Learning Motivations and Outcomes

Abstract

In the era nowadays, due to the various effects brought by globalization and progress of promoting diversity, the distance between different people around the world seems to be shrinking closer, which makes their second language (L2) abilities much more important. From a general point of view, there are many factors that potentially affect Second Language Acquisitions (SLA) of a person. For example, the influence of a language learner’s parental background and family environment on the learner’s motivations and outcomes is one of the factors that scholars pay much attention on recently. Specifically, researchers tend to focus on common phenomena such as: how parents who have experience of studying abroad possibly influence their children’s attitude on learning other languages; how parents who studied in another country have different expectations on education; how their children respond with their different language learning motives, etc. That being said, there are still few information about how both the experience of parents studying oversea, plus the language environment parents provided, influence the mechanisms of their children studying a second language, shown in their motivations and outcomes. This study examined the relationships between parental studying abroad experience, home language environment, children’s L2 studying incentives and their relative learning outputs. By using data collected from online surveys and online/offline interviews on middle school/high school/college students in domestic region (China's mainland) and international regions, the study made use of descriptive statistics and independent samples T-test, and one way ANOVA (F-Test). In addition, this study was based on the theoretical framework provided by Second Language Acquisition Theory (SLAT), with a focus on the Acquisition Learning Hypothesis, Input Hypothesis, Monitor Hypothesis and Affective Filter Hypothesis proposed by Krashen.