M OTIVATION OF DISADVANTAGED CHILDREN

as a barrier in their future career, workplace advancement, welfare and life satisfaction.

Literacy development seems to be a key issue in education, which also affects foreign language learning.

early-identification of the at-risk students, followed by the instruction and use of self-regulating behaviour strategies.

Research into motivation of disadvantaged children in the Hungarian context conducted by Fejes and Józsa (2005) aimed to reveal the effects of three dimensions of disadvantaged status (financial, emotional, linguistic), and the educational level and employment status of parents on the formation of learning motives of children. The differentiation of the children in relation to financial, emotional and linguistic disadvantage was based on the form teacher’s judgement. Children whose parents were unemployed were usually labelled as financially disadvantaged, and, more surprisingly, they were often also regarded as emotionally disadvantaged. The socioeconomic status seems to influence linguistic disadvantage the least. The findings showed that financial and emotional disadvantages are reflected in learning motivation; however, linguistic disadvantage does not seem to exert much influence. The desire for positive feedback for learning and the practical value of learning proves to be equally strong in financially advantaged and disadvantaged groups, in spite of the researchers’ previous expectations. Parents’ unemployment status does not seem to depreciate the value of knowledge. The mother’s university or college degree and the father’s secondary school leaving exam have a significantly positive effect on motivation. They also pointed out that the impact of home background does not seem to be decisive, as only 10% of the variance of motivation is explained by the children’s disadvantaged status.

The attitudes of children and parents are principally influenced by the personal educational context and by the specific learning context according to McGroarty (1996).

The attitudes of parents indicate “personal histories, including their responses to the wider cultural themes framing their own experiences” (p. 19). Parents’ negative school memories may have a severe effect on children’s attitude to schooling and learning.

Caro, MacDonald and Willms (2009) highlighted the significance of disillusionment to students of low socioeconomic status as they become aware of their limited opportunities later in life, and consequently, they become less motivated and apply less effort to learning. This research stressed disappointment in education as the main source of lack of expectations and diminished motivation in older students from financially disadvantaged families.

Parental encouragement and involvement play an important role in children’s educational motivation. In a recent sociological study, Lareau (2003) observed serious differences between parenting approaches in middle-class and in working-class families in an intensive ethnographic investigation in the United States. She classified these two distinct approaches as “sustaining natural growth” and “concerted cultivation”.

Concerted cultivation involves considerable parental encouragement and reward, provision of extracurricular activities and supplementary tuition, substantial support with homework and additional educational activities, and selective peer encouragement.

Parents of low-income families only have capacity for children’s natural growth, because of the lack of resources. The effects of different parenting approaches are a sense of entitlement among middle-class children and a sense of constraint among working-class children.

Parenting approaches of Hungarian Roma families are also often described as not paying enough attention to the schooling of children, which may be due to different values (Havas, Kemény and Liskó, 2002). Levinson (2007) draws attention to similar distinction of values when investigating Roma families in UK claiming that the Romas see the relationship between school success and life success as arbitrary.

Parents’ effect is also present in modern conceptual models of motivation. The term milieu is used in second language motivation research to refer to language

learners’ immediate environment including friends and families. Gardner’s “Socio-Educational Model of Second Language Acquisition” assumes that “the sociocultural milieu plays an important role in that it can influence individuals’ levels of attitudes, motivation, and anxiety as well as the relative importance that these attributes play in the second language learning process” (Gardner, Masgoret and Tremblay, 1999, p. 422).

The concept of milieu can also involve the whole community of the learner or can be restricted to learning experiences at home. This study further confirms the sensitivity of language learning attitudes to the contextual circumstances of the environment.

Parents’ role in motivation has been the focus of several studies. Gardner’s early study (1968) differentiated the kinds of parental roles. The active role stands for conscious encouragement and monitoring (e.g. by helping with homework) in order to promote children’s second learning success. The passive role is more underlying and subtle, however, more significant, as it includes parents’ attitudes towards the second language community. His findings indicate that parents influence greatly the students’

reactions towards the learning situation and also their efforts in language learning.

Kormos and Csizér (2005) also emphasized that children’s immediate environment, the milieu, has an important role in motivation in two ways. Firstly, it is important how much friends and family members appreciate intercultural contact and the knowledge of the English language, and secondly, how children see themselves as language learners. Findings of this qualitative study indicated that parental influences play an important role in the preactional and actional phase of motivation working in the process model of motivation proposed by Dörnyei (2001). The preactional phase refers largely to the language choice when studies begin, which is usually decided by the family. Family values seem to be significant because a lot of parents are reported to consider it to be very important for their children to learn a language. Family

background is also important in the actional phase of motivation by sending the children to private lessons or language courses abroad, buying foreign language books, magazines or audio materials or watching foreign language films. Travelling abroad and intercultural contacts are also important factors in maintaining motivation. However, the above described motivational actions of the family depend on financial resources. Low-income families in contemporary Hungary can hardly afford them.

In a recent approach to second language motivation proposed by Dörnyei (2005), he constructed a three dimensional model of L2 motivational system: the ideal L2 self, the ought-to L2 self, and the L2 learning experience. The detailed description of this model is beyond the scope of the present study. What is important is that the role of parents is present in the ought-to L2 self, which contains attributes that one believes one ought to possess in order to avoid possible negative outcomes. Csizér and Lukács (2010) also found a positive relationship between parental encouragement and the ought-to L2 self. Galántai and Csizér (2009) added force to the importance of parents’

encouragement as the relationship between parental encouragement and motivated learning, ideal L2 self and ought-to L2 self appeared to be significant; moreover, it also affected the L2 learning experience. This study indicated that the parents’ role is even more important than the teachers’ role in foreign language learning.

Csapó (2001) investigated the factors influencing foreign language learning and knowledge in Hungary. He found that parents’ educational level (especially that of the mother) determines largely which language the child begins to learn. Children of educated women are more likely to choose the English language. Different tasks of foreign language performance also indicate that the mothers’ educational background affects the children’s results significantly, especially in reading tasks.

As far as the motivation of children with special learning needs is concerned, Silliman, Butler and Wallach (2003) argued that they have reduced motivation as they have to face permanent failure as learners; this reduced motivation results in further cycles of failure and reduced self-esteem. On the contrary, a Hungarian study (Józsa and Fazekasné, 2007) investigating motivation of children with learning disabilities found that in the lower primary school (aged 6 to 10 years) no difference can be found between children’s’ motivation, from the 5th grade (aged 10 years) the motivation of both groups started to reduce. However, the motivation of children with learning disabilities did not reduce as strongly as the motivation of mainstream children.

Surprisingly, it resulted in a significant difference in motivation in favour of children with learning disabilities.

To summarize this section on research on motivation, it can be said that all studies agree that home background has a significant impact on motivation. Parental involvement, parental values, positive parenting style and educational aspirations reinforce children’s motivation to succeed and frame how children perform in school.

The precise factors of the process are still under investigation as they operate in several ways, “ranging from the role model potential of positive/negative behaviours and the communication of educational regrets, to the ways in which parents help to construct their children's understandings of language importance and status” (Bartram, 2006, p.

218).