Page 61 - Second language development of newly arrived migrant kindergarteners - Frederike Groothoff
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Present study: extended research questions and methodology 61 person needs different aspects of language. Language therefore should also be assessed in such a way that it captures multiple essential features. From my experience as a teacher, language in Dutch school settings is assessed mostly with receptive and productive vocabulary tasks in which pupils must point to pictures after hearing a target word or name the picture, assessing the breath of vocabulary. Word description is also a common task in which pupils must describe a certain word, for example “what is a chair?” A more communicative task according to communicative competence would also involve discourse and thus narratives. However, due to the time- consuming aspect of the evaluation of spontaneous discourse this is a test which is not often performed by teachers. Language sample analyses are mainly used for further diagnostic research only when a teacher has concerns about a pupil’s language development. The initial goal of this dissertation was to investigate how second language vocabulary developed and thus we wanted to incorporate receptive and productive vocabulary tasks. A receptive vocabulary task was easy to find, but a productive task was harder to decide on. When we encountered a narrative task, we first wanted to analyze the stories solely on the use of vocabulary, but this was later extended to the investigation of general narrative ability. Thus, for the present study both a receptive vocabulary task (the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Task; PPVT; Dunn & Dunn, 2005) as well as a narrative task (Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives; MAIN; Gagarina et al., 2012) were included in the assessment of pupils’ second language proficiency. With these two assessments a more comprehensive picture could be given of the second language development of the newly arrived migrant kindergarteners. Even though it is acknowledged in the present study that looking at language development through a communicative competence lens will benefit language development assessment, this PhD research project could not cover all segments from the theory of communicative competence due to practical limitations. The choice therefore has been made to include more detailed information on only two segments of communicative competence by means of longitudinal data of the participants: (1) linguistic competence will be discussed in Chapter 4 about receptive vocabulary development and Chapter 5 about narrative ability. (2) Discourse competence will also be discussed in Chapter 5 about narrative ability. Additionally, sociocultural competence is briefly mentioned in Chapter 7. Based on the data that has been collected in the present study many segments of communicative competence could have been discussed, however, time limitations prevented us from analyzing the data on more segments of communicative competence. In Chapter 9 Section 9.5.3 we will include some points of departure how to fully assess communicative competence, including strategic competence. 


































































































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