A Study On The Influence Of Family Cultural Capital On Middle School Students’ English Academic Achievement

Since the 1960s of the last century, when "the Coleman report" was published, researchers at home and abroad began to pay widespread attention to the impact of family factors on students’ academic achievement. According to this report, individual learning achievement is not only related to the school teaching quality and personal efforts, but is also closely connected with family factors. By taking Bourdieu’s cultural capital theory as its theoretical base, the present study aims to explore the influence of family cultural capital on middle school students’ English academic achievement. Bourdieu divides cultural capital into three forms, including the institutionalized capital, the objectified capital and the embodied capital. Among the three forms, the objectified capital and the embodied capital are believed to be important factors that affect a student’s academic achievement. However, systematical research on how they influence students’ academic achievement is relatively lacking. The present study intends to adopt the empirical research to do a specific quantification of the three forms of cultural capital to explore the correlation between family cultural capital and middle school students’ English academic achievement. This study was done at a middle school of Nanshui County, Zhuhai City, Guangdong province, in which the author selected 118 students in the regular class as research subject, and prepared the students questionnaire and parents questionnaire to obtain basic data, then she adopted statistical description, independent sample t-test, correlation analysis etc. to analyze the influence of family cultural capital on middle school students’ English academic achievement.The major findings of this study are as follows. First, students with different academic achievement levels vary significantly in terms of the cultural capital owned by their families. Among the three forms of cultural capital, the higher-level group of students of household institutionalized capital and embodied capital is significantly higher than the lower-level group, but there is no significant difference in the ownership of objectified capital. Second, parents’ occupation in this study as a control variable to analyze the influence of cultural capital on middle school students’English academic achievement yields the finding that family cultural capital has a significant influence on student’s English academic achievement, of which the embodied capital has the largest effect on student’s English academic achievement. Third, there is significant correlation among the three forms of cultural capital, objectified capital and embodied capital being most relevant.Finally, according to the findings of this study, the author attempts to put forward some operable implications from such perspectives of society, school, and family in hoping to improve the accumulation of family cultural capital together, and thus to promote students’ academic achievement in English.