Social capitals and english language learning in an iranian language institute

Abstract

This study aimed to 1) explore the social capitals of students who had registered in the three branches of Khorasan Language Institute (KLI) to learn English, 2) establish their factorial validity and 3) explore their relationship with English language achievement. To this end the 40-item Social Capital Scale (SCS) developed by Khodadady and Alaee (2012) and validated with grade three senior high school students in Mashhad was modified and administered to 493 female English language learners (ELLs) in the KLI. The application of Principal Axis Factoring and Varimax with Kaiser Normalization to the collected data showed that the SCS consisted of seven factors, i.e., Social Attachment, Parental Supervision, Parental Expectation, Helpful Others, Social Contact, Religious Activities, and Parent Availability. When the SCS was correlated with the ELLs’ scores on oral and written examinations, no significant relationship could be found between social capitals and English language achievement. Out of seven factors, only Helpful Others correlated significantly but negatively with ELLs' English achievement. The results are discussed from both empirical and theoretical perspectives and suggestions are made for future research.