Parental Involvement in EFL Learning With Preprimary Children

Abstract

A lockdown occurred in Spain in 2019-20 arising from COVID-19. This implied an adaptation from face-to-face to virtual teaching. Parents had to cope with their children's needs as for many learning areas (e.g., foreign languages). Taking into consideration children's English as a foreign language (EFL) learning, this work examines parents' (n=80) involvement by determining their familiarity with EFL, finding out whether they use tools for that purpose, and identifying their preferences about the features video tutorials should have. This is an exploratory mixed-methods research in which data were collected through a questionnaire. The results reveal that parents have a lower intermediate level of EFL and use it infrequently; they prefer videos to other tools like books, for example, and they opt for the features of video tutorials to be aesthetically appealing to kids and not related directly to language acquisition. So, parents do not get much involved in their children's EFL by using technological tools. Moreover, they have little knowledge of EFL and early language acquisition.