The correlation between the home and the school environment and language learning in Malta

Abstract

This study has been undertaken to throw some light on the effect of environmental factors on language learning. There were other questions, besides the ones tackled here, that I wanted to consider, but I could not, mainly because I did not have enough time to carry out the necessary investigations. The whole work took over two years to accomplish. It started in October, 1977, and was finished in August, 1979. A partial re-writing of the work was finished in hay 1980. During the first year, I was busy in the schools collecting material and information, giving tests and checking data; and in the second year I was involved in analysing the data and the samples, and in the actual writing of the dissertation. Throughout, I kept one important fact in mind: that THE CHILD WAS A HUMAN BEING. Throughout the study, I had to keep in mind that each child was an individual whose personality was composed of the characteristic integration of his modes of behaviour: interests, aptitudes, capacities, abilities and attitudes. Hiding the child. behind a codified name did not change anything.