The Formation of Parental Belief

Most of the papers about the effect of parental belief on childhood English learning emphasize the interconnection of the parent’s background, parental belief, and the children’s motivation and attitude of English learning.

However, rarely papers deal with the formation of parental belief on children’s English learning or explore the main factors affecting the parental belief in children’s English learning.

What are the parent’s intentions in sending children to the bilingual kindergarten school? What are the reasons that support their belief that for learning English, it is the younger the better?

The parents’ belief of ‘the younger the better’ is influenced by the theory based on the critical period hypothesis (CPH)(Lenneberg, 1967; Penfield & Roberts, 1959; Scovel, 1988; Seliger, 1983).

Since the parental belief in childhood English learning is influenced by CPH, there is a need to investigate the cogency of CPH.

References

Lenneberg, E.H. (1967). The Biological foundations of language. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Penfield, W., & Roberts, L. (1959). Speech and brain mechanisms. New York: Atheneum.

Scovel, T. (1988). A time to speak: A psycholinguistic inquiry into the critical period for human speech. New York: Newbury House.

Seliger, H.W. (1983). On the possible role of the right hemisphere in second language acquisition. TESOL Quarterly, 16, 307–314.

Originally published at http://poeticmindfulness.wordpress.com on August 19, 2020.