Vision, Desire, Ideology: Parental motives concerning foreign language learning

Abstract

In the globalised 21st century, the importance of learning and speaking foreign languages has attracted much attention, and new directions have emerged in foreign language learning research over the past decades. Our article introduces one of these, the so-called ’social turn’ of second language acquisition, whose advocates, while not rejecting cognitive and personality approaches, examine the importance and the factors of the social embeddedness and the social environment of learning foreign languages. Both international and Hungarian studies have established correlation between access to and achievement in learning foreign languages and socio-economic status. One of the most crucial components of access to and success in learning foreign languages is family background, including parental motives concerning the language learning of their children. Studying parents’ motives is a relatively new area of research into foreign language learning; there are few empirical studies, which approach this issue from several different aspects – there is no common conceptual framework or definition applied. Still, besides Bourdieu’s theory of different capitals and habitus, new theoretical approaches have taken shape, of which this article introduces two: foreign language learning as the projection of parental visions and desires about their children’s future and foreign language learning as parental investment into their children’s future in order to pass on or strengthen their social status.