Page 209 - Second language development of newly arrived migrant kindergarteners - Frederike Groothoff

General discussion and conclusions 209 Richness). For macrostructure, we looked at Story Structure, Structural Complexity, and Internal State Terms. The main findings were as follows:  Age was significant for five of the six measurements of narrative development. o For Number of Different Words, the Guiraud Index Score, and Internal State Terms the development was linear; each month a child grew older his or her stories contained more diverse words and also contained more terms about mental states and feelings of the story characters. o For the Measure of Lexical Richness and Story Structure there was growth over time, but the rate of growth is greater for younger pupils than for older pupils.  Exposure to Dutch at School had an effect on all language measures except for Internal State Terms. o For Number of Different Words, Guiraud Index Score, Measure of Lexical Richness, and Story Structure there was a fixed effect of exposure to Dutch at School: the longer a pupil attended a Dutch school, the more lexically diverse, lexically rich, and structured his or her storytelling. o For Story Structure there was an interaction between age and exposure to Dutch: the influence of exposure to Dutch at school was larger for younger pupils than for older pupils.  Comparisons of scores on measures of narrative ability of pupils who attended DL2- schools with the scores of pupils who attended mainstream schools showed no difference, except for an interaction effect between Age and Number of Different Words: for younger pupils the effect of educational facility on lexical diversity was larger than for older pupils. 9.2.3 The school learning environment Focusing on teacher behavior In Chapter 6 the aim was to investigate the pedagogical practices in the classroom focusing on teacher behavior. To investigate this, the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS; Pianta, La Paro, & Hamre, 2008) was used to measure the quality of several dimensions of teacher-child interactions in the different classrooms. The main findings were:  Overall, the teachers from both school types in this study showed a pattern in their scores over the ten dimensions of CLASS which was in accordance with results of previous national and international studies23: higher scores on the Emotional Support 23 cf. Mashburn, Justice, Downer, & Pianta, 2009; Pakarinen et al., 2010; Leseman & Veen, 2016; Henrichs & Leseman, 2016; Veen et al., 2017.