Home preparation of anglophone children for school: The influence of a different culture

Abstract

This qualitative study deals with home preparation for school of children with a different cultural background in the Czech Republic. This specifically concerns the anglophone minority group that reside in the country. According to Kachru's model, the Czech Republic belongs to the Expanding Circle, which means that the English language is only present as a foreign language. In the methodological part of this study, we focus on children with English as their mother tongue who attend Czech primary schools in the Czech Republic. These children need to cope not only with the different culture background of their parents, but also with a different language of education than their mother tongue. The parents in the families under examination try to make the conditions for school preparation easier for the children, but they encounter completely different problems with respect to their monocultural peers. In exceptional cases, they are even forced to change primary school.