This paper reports on parental involvement as experienced by a group of elite secondary school pupils in learning English vocabulary on the Chinese mainland. It highlights the variety of strategies that Chinese parents adopted to support, sustain and enhance these pupils' efforts to learn English vocabulary. They functioned as critical agents regulating and controlling their children's learning process and provided social opportunities for them to deepen/widen their engagements with English. These parents also mediated the pupils' motivational discourses, beliefs and knowledge. In addition, they supported their learning with enormous material investment. Further research into parental involvement in children's learning of additional languages is believed to generate important findings for the development of teacher-parent collaboration that can help equalise the effects of unequal familial resources that different learners can access in respect of their achievements in learning languages. (Contains 1 table and 20 extracts.)