Saudi migrant children’s motivation to learn English in the UK and its relationship with their bilingual family language policy and practices

Many parents who travel to Anglophone countries for study purposes take their families with them and as a result their children get exposed to new environments. This transcultural experience entails a great deal of exposure to the English language and increases the need to learn it. In such a context, a healthy family environment is important. The family language practices shaped by parents can play a critical role in influencing the linguistic attainments of their children. Self-determination theory advocates that parents can create supporting environments and thereby increase children’s motivation to fulfil a task. They can construct an environment in which children do not feel pressured to do a task (autonomy-support), provide guidance to children to do the imposed task (competence-support) and provide emotional support to carry on an imposed regulation (relatedness-support). Such a context tends to increase children’s intrinsic or autonomous extrinsic motivation. This multiple case study explored the language practices of five Saudi families residing in the UK. It investigated parental beliefs on language learning and how they shaped their family language policies and practices. It also studied how children’s motivation to learn English was influenced by parental involvement. Qualitative data were obtained from interviews with five doctoral student parents, one partner of those students and seven children aged 10-17. Reflective journals kept by the participating children were also analysed. Thematic analysis of the acquired data showed that the parents believed that parental involvement was not a need in the UK as the environment would naturally ensure language learning, although they supported their children’s English language learning for extrinsic orientations (such as university study). In almost all cases, parents’ practices were restricted to following up English homework. Many of the children expressed unpleasant feelings about learning English because of the continuous challenges which they encountered in the UK. There was also a rise in controlled extrinsic motivation among the participant children. These results demonstrated that children also played an active role in shaping the family language practices, which highlights child agency in language learning.