Parents’ and Students’ Perceptions on the Importance of Teaching and Learning English

Abstract

This research work entitled Parents’ and Students’ Perceptions on the Importance of Teaching and Learning English is an attempt to explore the perceptions of secondary level students towards the importance of learning English in terms of carrier opportunity, social recognition, economic enhancement, language and cultural issues and English for self-satisfaction and self-esteem and to find out the perceptions of parents‟ towards the importance of teaching and learning English to their children. I selected 20 secondary level students and 20 parents from 2 secondary schools of Udayapur district as sample for this study. Ten secondary level students were selected from each sample school. Non-random judgemental sampling procedure was used to select schools, students and parents. Questionnaire and interview were used to collect the data for this study. The findings of the study showed that learning English offers a good career prospect. Moreover, findings showed that learning English; people have lots of opportunities in the fields like business, tourism, medicine and teaching profession. In the same way, secondary level students agreed that good competence in English language provides better opportunities to the people for doing trade and business internationally. Similarly, findings showed that the parents were interested towards the importance of teaching and learning English to their children as English works as a link language that helps the people to travel and trade internationally and as English is necessary to work in the fields like tourism and diplomacy This thesis is organized into five chapters. The first chapter deals with the background of the study, statement of the problem, objectives of the study, research questions, significance of the study, delimitations of the study and operational definition of the key terms. The second chapter includes review of related theoretical literature, review of related empirical literature, implications of the review for the study and conceptual framework. Similarly, the third chapter includes design and method of the study, population, sample and sampling strategy, study areas, data collection tools and techniques, data collection procedures and data analysis and interpretation procedure. Likewise, the fourth chapter presents the analysis and interpretation of results, i.e. 4.1 and the fifth chapter includes conclusions and recommendations at three different areas (policy related, practice related and further research related) followed by references and appendices.