Parental involvement influences the relationship between children’s L2 Chinese reading motivation and reading performance : a longitudinal person-centred moderation analysis

Abstract

Despite acknowledging the importance of parental factors and children’s reading motivation in early childhood reading development, the scholarly focus has been primarily on traditional variable-centered approaches and has neglected their heterogeneity. This longitudinal study tracked 317 Hong Kong L2 Chinese first-graders and their parents, using a person-centered approach to analyze parental involvement patterns in children’s L2 reading. It also explored how these patterns influence the relationships between children’s motivation and their L2 reading performance. Latent profile analysis results revealed three distinct groups of L2 Chinese parents’ reading involvement with their children: ambivalent, balanced, and enthusiastic parents. Wald chi-square analysis showed that students with enthusiastic parents exhibited the strongest reading motivation, compared with the other two groups. Mixture regression results indicated that reading motivation had a significantly stronger impact on the reading performance of students with parents in the balanced parents’ group than it did on the performance of students with parents in the enthusiastic parents’ group, whereas no such predictive relationship existed with the ambivalent parents’ group. This study highlights the significance of parental involvement in children’s reading and elucidates the complex relationship between motivation and reading performance.