Parents' views on Chinese young learners' foreign language learning attitudes and motivation: A mixed methods study

Abstract Young learners' attitudes and motivation are important indicators of foreign language learning success and have thus attracted increasing attention over the last decades. As a large country where English is taught as a foreign language (EFL) and children generally start learning English at an early age, China provides an ideal context to study the attitudes and motivation of young EFL learners. Drawing upon the socio-educational model, this study surveyed 521 Chinese parents using an online questionnaire and interviewed eight of them to examine their perspectives on their children's attitudes and motivation towards EFL learning. The findings suggest that parental factors – socioeconomic status and parental involvement – influence young learners' EFL attitudes and motivation, as perceived by their parents. Parental factors, age at the onset of English language learning and intensity of exposure explained a significant amount of the variation in parents’ reports on the attitudes and motivation of young learners. Furthermore, the parents reported that their children's EFL attitudes and motivation were constantly changing, and that family, school and extracurricular training appeared to play different roles in this process of change.