Conceptions of the family-school relationship: boosting English language learning

There are not many studies in Colombia that focus on the relationship between parents and educational institutions or on the contributions of the former to their children’s learning processes. This article aims to identify and understand the possible kinds of relations between family and school, and their impact on learning a second language, in this case English. For this purpose, we conducted a collaborative research project, which can be characterised as qualitative and exploratory, in which we surveyed about 250 stakeholders and interviewed about 80 educational actors which included teachers, parents and students from four elementary schools, public and private, with different profiles and belonging to different socio-economic strata, from the city of Bogota, Colombia. This article presents the findings, which also led to the design and implementation of strategies, by some of the participating schools, that aimed to create in practice a model of the school-family relationship that can boost the students’ learning of the English language. We found that there is a great motivation in the vast majority of participants in promoting such learning, but there are also some tensions between teachers and parents concerning the teaching and learning of English.