Parents’ Involvement in Young Children’s English Language Education Post Pandemic

Abstract

The importance of English language has been causing major concerns among parents for many decades now and has prompted parents to find alternatives, apart from formal schooling when it comes to children's English language acquisition. Parental involvement in children's education, a phenomenon that has been existing in the Malaysian educational arena has gone multiple transformations prior, during and post the Covid-19 pandemic. Although a vast body of research is available on parental involvement and children's development, in the context of Malaysia very little research has been conducted that exclusively focuses on parental involvement in their children's education of English Language. In view of this context, this research study was therefore undertaken to investigate parents' involvement in teaching English language to their primary school children at home. Apart from gaining insights on whether parents do involve in their children's English language learning at home, the study also examined the methods parents used and found effective. To undertake this study, a set of questionnaires was designed and distributed via e-mail to the clustered sample. 51 parents from primary schools at Port Klang, Selangor participated in this study. Since the survey was conducted online through Google sheet, the data was processed through Spreadsheet-based data analysis to gather findings. Based on the data analysis, the study found that 70.6% parents were directly involved in the teaching of English language at home. Findings also indicated that the of various methods of teaching children, about 62.5% was through technology mainly consisting online-based learning platforms (32.95%) and online printed materials (29.55%). In terms of effective method, parents strongly pointed that they engaged better through interactive learning platforms when opting to teach English to their young children at home mainly due to certain design elements used such as video, audio and gamification-sort of lesson content that can have an impact on learning, motivation, and educational outcomes.