Page 143 - Second language development of newly arrived migrant kindergarteners - Frederike Groothoff

Pedagogical practices: focus on teacher behavior 143 executed within the Henrichs and Leseman (2016) study showed that the scores in the instructional support domain can increase as a result of professionalization and direct feedback after observations. Based on previous studies we could not predict any differences between DL2- schools and Mainstream schools because these two types had never explicitly been compared. Nevertheless, since the teachers at DL2-schools have a focus on learning the Dutch language, we might have expected differences in, for example, the scores on Language. However, this was not found in our study. An explanation for this could be that both teachers at DL2-schools and Mainstream schools use similar tools for the stimulation of language development of kindergarteners, since all kindergarteners are in the process of acquiring the language. Nonetheless, for both types of schools it is recommended to train the teachers to improve their behavior with respect to Language Modeling, that is, on the whole of the instructional support domain. The two significant variables from this Chapter 6 (the dimension Positive Climate and the dimension Regard for Student Perspectives) will be used in Chapter 8 in order to look at the effects of learning environment characteristics on the development of the different second language measures from Chapter 4 and 5. But first, Chapter 7 will continue with the investigation of the school learning environment, focusing on the focal pupils’ experiences instead of teacher behavior.