靜慧 3/17/2007

Time: 3/17/2007
Place: Ching-hui's apartment at Brackenridge
Speaker: Ching-hui Hsiao (蕭靜慧), Foreign Language Education
Host: Kaiman Chang


Do family Influences really matter?
--Researching the role of family influences on English education in Taiwan--

The purpose of this study is to investigate family influences on EFL education in Taiwan. Bourdieu (1977) uses the term, social reproduction, to analyze how the various forms of capital tend to transfer from one generation to the next. The children of privilege fit into the world of educational expectations with apparent “ease”, a process he calls “under-selection”. The unprivileged found the process to be “difficult”, presenting “challenges”, a process he calls “over-selection”. Yet both are dictated by their upbringing. Bourdieu regards this “ease” or “natural“ ability as the product of a great social labor, largely on the part of the parents, equipping their children with the dispositions of manner and ensuring they are able to succeed within the educational system and can then reproduce their parent’ class in the wider social system.

In his study conducted in a city in central Taiwan, Broaded (1997) nevertheless finds the standardized test scores of the entrance examination are not significantly correlated with students’ family backgrounds among a sample of 1,098 junior high graduates and concludes that institutional tracking in junior high schools in Taiwan reduces the influence of family background characteristics on the distribution to stratified senior secondary opportunities. Other than institutional factors, cultural (Confucianism) factors also help explain these differences--educational achievement values are more diffused into the lower levels of Taiwan’s class structure than the case in the U.S. because of the cultural legacy of Confucianism.