Influence of Socio-cultural Environment on the English Language Proficiency of Secondary School Students

Learning cannot prosper without conducive learning contexts. According to Vygotsky, learning is the outcome of social interaction between the individual and society. In the context of educational achievements of learners, various sociocultural components, homely conditions, classroom environment, social interactions etc. can play an essential role for learning. Even learning a language as a discipline requires appropriate learning backgrounds to develop the skills needed to garner the particular knowledge. The present study has embarked upon the idea of finding the relationship between the Sociocultural determinants and English language proficiency among the Bengali-medium secondary school students of North-24-Pargana. However, this study examines whether the sociocultural determinants influence the English language proficiency of the students, especially their reading and writing abilities. It has employed a quantitative approach to investigate the relationship. Descriptive analysis and correlational analysis were performed to analyse the collected data. A T-test was also conducted to compare two different groups of students. The population of the study was class-x students of Bengali-medium rural and urban co-ed schools of West Bengal. A sample of 200 class-x students were randomly selected using a simple random sampling technique.  Four co-ed secondary schools were randomly selected from North-24-Pargana district, two each from urban and rural areas. From each school 50 students including 25 boys and 25 girls were randomly selected. Tools used for this study are culturally adopted self-constructed Sociocultural Scale designed for students to collect data and Reading and Writing Ability Scale to measure their English language proficiency ability. The result shows that socio-cultural environments have a significant impact on the performance of English proficiency of the secondary school students. Gender difference does not influence on the achievement of English proficiency. But, urban students having more convenient environment like academic resources, parental consciousness, accessibility to different learning materials and so on perform better than those of rural students.