Cultural Capital and English Language Achievement at Grade Three in Iranian High Schools

Abstract

This study administered the Persian cultural capital scale (CCS) compiled by Khodadady and Natanzi (2012) to three hundred and ten grade three high school (G3HS) students. The subjection of the collected data to the principal axis factoring and rotating the extracted latent variables via Varimax with Kaiser Normalization produced nine factors, i.e ., Cultural Investment , Religious Commitment , Artistic Appreciation , Cultural Visits , Cultural Commitment , Cultural Curiosity , Cultured Family , Literate Family , and Higher Education . These results showed that compared to university students, more factors underlie G3HS students’ cultural capitals. Reliability and correlational analyses showed that not only the CCS itself but also its eight factors were reliable and most of them correlated significantly with each other. Although no significant relationship could be found between the CCS and scores on English as a foreign language (EFL), one of its underlying factors, i.e., Literate Family , correlated positively and significantly with the EFL. Another factor, i.e., Religious Commitment , however, revealed a negatively significant relationship with the EFL. Results are discussed and suggestions are made for future research.