Our case study analyzes a native Mandarin Chinese speaker who is currently studying at a U.S. institution of higher learning. For purposes of this study, we will refer to the subject as Jay. Jay was born and raised in Shandong Province, China and studied there until he graduated high school. He began learning English at 10 years old and is currently 21. The purpose of this case study is to analyze the effect of his motivation and linguistics and social environment on his language learning.
We asked Jay a set of questions about his social and cultural background to better understand the importance of his language learning and how it affected his success and/or failure. We found out that his society and perspective of the target language had …show more content…
He said that originally, he was better in writing and reading, given that that was the focus in his school. What is interesting is that he says now, he feels that his level of speaking and listening are the same as his reading and writing. In an intriguing study done by Mingmei Du, she analyzes student from the Shandong Province, where Jay is from, and their self perception of English and how it affects their language learning. Because Jay defines himself as having originally being intimidated by the language, but is now confident, we compared the results of what Du found. She found that those who had more confidence and subsequently practiced more had the highest correlation with improved speaking ability (Du, 2012). This is thought provoking because Jay says that he never practiced, but he is confident in his upper intermediate proficiency levels. We thought that this could be due to other variables such as gender and age; however, Du found that males tended to generally have lower self-perception, especially in relation to women who had a significantly higher perception on average (Du, 2012). This then begs the question, where does Jay’s high level of self-perception in SLA come …show more content…
This situation could somehow affect the success level in his language acquisition because the only time he could practice English was the time at school, which was not enough for an advanced command of English. In a study done by Guofang Li, he focuses on the importance of the home environment and the role it has with second language acquisition. Li states that “recent research from a wide variety of disciplines suggests that language and literacy learning is deeply embedded in the social fabric of schools and homes and that school success is dependent upon a complex combination of home school variables that may vary from child to child” (Li, 2007). Thus, we believe that Jay lacked, in part, a deeper language learning since he could not practice nor get any kind of feedback about English at home. As Li discusses in his study, home context has to do with SLA since students spend most of the time there besides school. If there is not an external motivation to improve the language skills - outside the classroom setting - the students’ educational attainment with a specific language would not have the same impact as if there was some “family capital”, meaning the family input in a second language acquisition
We asked Jay a set of questions about his social and cultural background to better understand the importance of his language learning and how it affected his success and/or failure. We found out that his society and perspective of the target language had …show more content…
He said that originally, he was better in writing and reading, given that that was the focus in his school. What is interesting is that he says now, he feels that his level of speaking and listening are the same as his reading and writing. In an intriguing study done by Mingmei Du, she analyzes student from the Shandong Province, where Jay is from, and their self perception of English and how it affects their language learning. Because Jay defines himself as having originally being intimidated by the language, but is now confident, we compared the results of what Du found. She found that those who had more confidence and subsequently practiced more had the highest correlation with improved speaking ability (Du, 2012). This is thought provoking because Jay says that he never practiced, but he is confident in his upper intermediate proficiency levels. We thought that this could be due to other variables such as gender and age; however, Du found that males tended to generally have lower self-perception, especially in relation to women who had a significantly higher perception on average (Du, 2012). This then begs the question, where does Jay’s high level of self-perception in SLA come …show more content…
This situation could somehow affect the success level in his language acquisition because the only time he could practice English was the time at school, which was not enough for an advanced command of English. In a study done by Guofang Li, he focuses on the importance of the home environment and the role it has with second language acquisition. Li states that “recent research from a wide variety of disciplines suggests that language and literacy learning is deeply embedded in the social fabric of schools and homes and that school success is dependent upon a complex combination of home school variables that may vary from child to child” (Li, 2007). Thus, we believe that Jay lacked, in part, a deeper language learning since he could not practice nor get any kind of feedback about English at home. As Li discusses in his study, home context has to do with SLA since students spend most of the time there besides school. If there is not an external motivation to improve the language skills - outside the classroom setting - the students’ educational attainment with a specific language would not have the same impact as if there was some “family capital”, meaning the family input in a second language acquisition