Page 148 - Second language development of newly arrived migrant kindergarteners - Frederike Groothoff

148 Chapter 7 were mainly teacher led (more than 80%). Teachers used scaffolding half of the time in interactions with pupils during language and mathematical activities. For play the pupils were alone one third of the time, and with their peers half of the time. Around one fifth of the time they interacted with their teacher during play. During these interactions the teacher used scaffolding around 10% of the time. Another Dutch study about activities in kindergartens (De Haan, Elbers, & Leseman, 2014), with 91 pupils aged 3 to 6, reported that teacher-managed language and literacy activities took place around 15% of the time, which was the highest proportion for pre-academic activities (language, math, or literacy activities). No activity, waiting, or mere transitions took a large proportion according to their observations. The current study used the same snapshot procedure as Henrichs and Leseman (2016), but with adapted codes to focus on different aspects of activities, interactions and language use. The codes were created to obtain a more complete picture of the school learning environment of the newly arrived migrant pupils in the class, our focal pupils. The focus was on the interactions between the focal pupil and the teacher or their peers and on the use of languages in the classroom because with this information the language input can be analyzed. It was expected that these would be important explanatory factors in the second language development of the kindergarteners. 7.3 Method 7.3.1 Participants Forty-two pupils (21 girls) participated in this part of the study (see Section 3.4 in Chapter 3 for detailed description of the participants). The 42 pupils were enrolled at 10 different schools; the same schools of which the teachers participated in the observations with CLASS (see Chapter 6). Table 7.1 provides the descriptive characteristics of the participants in this study. Age is the average age over the two observation days within this study.