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.