Forms of social support and foreign language attainment: The mediating effect of gender

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the relationship between adolescents’ social support network and L2 achievement, as mediated by gender. The main sources of social support for teenagers are their families, peers and teachers, with whom they interact most frequently. These three groups play a buffering role between stress and psychological well-being by helping teenagers cope with adverse challenges (Demaray et al. 2009). Empirical studies on social support demonstrate that gender is an important factor, with female adolescents perceiving higher levels of support from the three groups (Bokhorst et al. 2010). Also, in the situation of stress caused by the necessity to learn a foreign language as a compulsory subject, social support appears to be an important aspect of classroom climate that may influence learners’ academic achievement. The results of empirical research carried out in the context of the Polish secondary grammar school demonstrate that in the case of both genders (N = 609) students perceive greatest levels of parental support, which can be attributed to the character of Polish culture, in which parents still play a very important role in the life of adolescents, thereby eliminating ambiguity. This type of support is modestly correlated with grades in the case of girls, and with self-perceived levels of FL skills in male informants, a fact that is ascribed to gender differences in perception of assessment. Teacher support is assessed lowest of all the forms of social support in both genders, and of all the three types of social support only peer support has proven to be a weak predictor of FL achievement.