Parents’ and teachers’ hope & ideas for future parent-school interaction in an English training centre in China

7.3.1 Parents’ hopes and ideas for future parent-school interaction

From the parents’ part, the expectation for the future can be categorized into: 1. a test after each level to know exact what their children know what they don't know (Vocabulary, phonics, sentences, grammar, etc.);

more videos about the normal class; extra activities only focussing on speaking;

If the school can organize, the life clubs, for example, big and small children, they can all attend. It may be like that, the elder children can tell some stories, or read some picture books, the younger children can listen, because to them, the communication between children and between children them-selves, are different from the communication between children and teachers. (Parent3)

2. calling for training lessons for parents about the contents their children learning;

She is still so young now, even she has strong enthusiasm to learn, her sense, that is the sense of direc-tion (in learning), she cannot manage well. If parents, they can know where the important parts are, which parts to practice, parents must be more clear than (child), So, if the school can give some guid-ing in this aspect, believe the children’s scores can increase a lot (…) you can’t treat all the parents as they are illiterate, I mean in English, you should to parents, like school, the public school, give

re-quirements, specific requirement, in this lesson, what is the important (language) points are, what problems we want to solve, in this way, parents can help (children) practice in this part at home, for example, this part, it requires to use “have”, this form, past tense, the importance (of this lesson) is this word, then at home, we have objectives, maybe, I , actively, with her, myself, I can’t speak imme-diately at that moment, but I can prepare in advance, to have some certain practice in this part. (Par-ent2)

3. teachers treating children in different ways and support them according to their own learning need. It is to be noted that one of the parent participant does not expect much more interaction with school. She believes that the current interactions are enough to get information about her child’s learning. She is busy at work.

7.3.2 Teachers’ hopes and ideas for future parent school interaction programs

Parents can actively communicate with teachers

Make the children’s learning process to be the connection of the three parties (school, parents, and teachers). But not consider as mutually, like parent-school, or parent-children or teacher-children in-teraction. Make it not in the form of single interaction but a cycle of three parties. I believe if every parent can participate, as a whole class, or whole school, teaching from teacher and the learning out-comes from children, the understanding of their children’s learning from parents. It can make grow healthily progress in a positive way. (Teacher2)

The expectation from teachers further explains Hoover-Dempsey’s (1997) idea that all parties should be in-volved in making good policy for involving parents. Teachers hope there are more time to be allocated to PTM and restart the Parent Academy.

I think to improve parental involvement in their children’s learning, we can restart doing the previous, parents academy, to the parents of different ages, we had different levels of guiding lessons for parents.

From course book, teaching, target language points, and every aspect, there was a simple, fast train-ing (to the parents), in this way, parents know how to supervise their children at home. This can avoid

that parents don’t know what to do, or if they think that they can’t speak English, they couldn’t involve to their children’s learning, like this. (Teacher3)

They hope there can be a long-term close communication and cooperation between school and parents.

“Every party (Parent, teacher and school know their responsibility and cooperate better to support children”

(Teacher1). Improvement for Parent page apps (progress report both written in Chinese and English) and assigning specific homework for parents which can guide them how to support their children at home are also proposed by teachers.

7.3.3 The school’s plan for future parent school interaction programs

From the centre manager’s point of view, firstly, most of the parents have less awareness of the responsi-bilities as parents to support their children’s English learning. They believe their children can learn well in school. There is no need for parents to support much. According to this, the school is planning to conduct some lessons for parents to improve the parents’ awareness of how important parents’ roles are in their chil-dren’s English learning. Parents can also do their responsibilities at home in supporting chilchil-dren’s English learning.

Secondly, the school is currently doing Parent Academy for promotion of summer and winter intensive courses. The Parent Academy now is more general but the school is considering doing more about Parent Academy.

In a long term, we should make it common, regular, benefit the parents. I mean not only consider the profits, like earning money, I think we should make it a long term plan about it (parent academy). In long term, support children’s learning, help them grow and improve better. (Centre manager) In this study, the last teacher participant interviewing was conducted after the centre manager (about one month after interviewed centre manager). Actually, the school already started the specific planning of doing the Parent Academy. The current plan for Parent Academy is based on the problems which parents meet in supporting their children at home.

For example, to the children who will enter primary school from Kindergarten, we will invite their parents and introduce the phonics course, after the introduction, the parents can talk about the course, what kind of problems their children meet at home, when the parents communicate, there may be more problems coming out. Another parent academy is like that, we have a topic today, how to improve children’s writing, there are some questions first, then the parents talk and discuss together, they give some solutions, the teacher also give some experience, for example, in the class, some children im-proved their writing through what kind of ways. (Teacher 6)

According to the teacher, the parents who are going to be invited are those whose children are in the same level. That is to say, it is according to the level but not aiming to every class.

It indicates apparently that the focus for future parent school interaction goes to the Parent Academy, which parents and teachers both expect. The school is also planning to launch on it. About the contents of the Parent Academy, parents expect to give more specific training on the contents of what the children learn (vocabularies, phonics, grammar, etc.). However, the school is planning to arrange the Parent Academy based on the problems parents meet when they support their children. Apparently, there is a gap between parents’ expectation and the school’s future plan. According to Barton, et al. (2004), when the parents be-come more active in engaging in the interaction between school , when they engage in specific ways in sup-porting, parental involvement can be effective.

In the previous studies about parent school interactions are very specific. Concrete programs were con-ducted and parents were trained by school on how to support their children in very specific ways (Neuman, 1995; Timmons & Pelletier, 2015; Donna & Ali, 2014). There are concrete programs like literacy bags (Rowe & Fian, 2013; Deborah, Gilliam, & Lisa, 2013; Huang, 2013), reading story program (Kuma, 2011), teacher parents close cooperation (Velasco, 2014). Especially, the specific hand by hand training programs (Wessel, 2014; Rosado, Jimenez, & Kieffer, 2015) set examples on how to conduct training programs for parents. It is apparent that in the current case study, the school is in the initial stage of involving parents and doing the parents training programs. The previous study mentioned above can set good examples of how to conducting. Especially, in this case study, the expectation from parents is very concrete and specific, that is to train them in details and teach them how to support their children according to what they have learned.

The previous study actually recommend on how to improve children’s comprehension, phonics, phonemic awareness, and vocabulary development (Collier & Auerbach, 2011). About Wundenberg (2012) also sug-gests how to use the mother language to support children in learning English, specific strategies. As in the current study, parents reflected that they are not confident in their English level to support their children.

However, this is not big problems in preventing their engagement in their children’s English learning. Since the relationship between school and parents are critically important for the directions of the strategies. The strategies (Wundenberg, 2012) provide concrete action plans regarding to this. Furthermore, features of schools which engage parents more successfully are discussed by Henderson & Mapp (2012) which may benefit future parent school interaction.