the relationship between family involvement, socioeconomic status and iranian efl student’s language learning

Over recent years, parental participation in their children’s education has been centre of
focus in different research studies. however, more studies have been done in relation to
parental level of participation and how they influence their children’s education; hence
limited studies have focused on how parents’ socio-economic variables may contribute
to their involvement with children’s education. the purpose of this study was therefore
to investigate the influence of parents’ socio-economic status (education, occupation and
income) ontheir level of participation (communication, decision making and
collaboration) in children’s education. strategies used by schools to enhance parental
level of participation in their children’s education were also investigated. this study was
conducted to discover how parental involvement and their socioeconomic status can
relate to iranian efl students’ language learning outcomes. to this end, 50 efl
students studying in guyesh institute in aliabad katoul, iran together with theirparents
were selected to participate in this study. the instruments utilized by the researcher for
data collection included family involvement questionnaires (fiq) adapted from
fantuzzo, tighe, & childs (2000, as cited in jeffries, 2012) consisting of three main
parts, namely home-based involvement, school based involvement, home-school
conference (video and telephone) as well as socioeconomic status questionnaire (ses)
(garmarudi& moradi, 2007) contains 6 general questions about income and wealth of
family. after collecting the data, a number of statistical procedures were used in order to
analyze the data. using pearson correlational analysis, it was revealed that among
parental involvement factors, parents’ home-based involvement has the strongest
relationship, while home-school conference has the weakest relationship with the
students’ learning outcomes. the findings of socioeconomic status questionnaire showed
that there is a positive and significant relationship between efl students’ family
involvement and their socioeconomic status. it means as socioeconomic status increases,
parental involvement may increase too. teachers and administrators can make use of the
results of this study which are discussed in the light of the literature.