Factors underlying the social and cultural capitals of high school students and their relationship with English achievement

Abstract

This study explored the relationship between social and cultural capitals and English achievement by developing, administering and validating a 35-item questionnaire to 706 students of five public and private high school students in Mashhad, Iran. The application of the Principle Axis Factoring to the participants' responses and rotating the extracted factors revealed ten latent variables, i.e., family-school interaction, facility consciousness, extracurricular and religious activities, parental consultation, literary and artistic appreciation, family support, family-peer relation, reading enjoyment, family encouragement, and self-confidence. No significant difference was found in the performance of private and public school students' scores on their final English examination. Neither the social and cultural capital questionnaire nor its ten extracted factors showed any significant relationship with the students' English achievement. However, when the performance of the students in private and public schools were analyzed separately and the items with low cross loading were removed from factors, a significant correlation was found between the second factor, i.e., facility consciousnesses, and the English achievement (r =.12, p