Page 89 - Second language development of newly arrived migrant kindergarteners - Frederike Groothoff
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Development of narrative ability 89 How does the narrative ability (in Dutch) of newly arrived migrant kindergarteners develop during the first two-and-a-half years of schooling in the Netherlands in relation to school type?12 The present chapter is structured as follows: before discussing the data collection, a brief review is given of what is already known about narrative ability development of second language learners using the MAIN. Then the methodology and results of data collected from 42 participants is discussed. The chapter ends with a discussion, which will be extended in Chapter 9. 5.2 Narrative ability development 5.2.1 Microstructure and macrostructure In Chapter 2 narrative ability development was discussed extensively; what follows here is a summary. Narrative ability is the ability to tell a story, and it can be analyzed from two perspectives: the microstructural level and the macrostructure level. Microstructure refers to how words and sentences work together to build a story. Semantic and syntactic productivity as well as complexity and accuracy are the basis on which microstructure is determined (Appose & Karuppali, 2018). Narrative macrostructure refers to the global organization of a story beyond the word, sentence, or utterance level (Blom & Boerma, 2016). Macrostructure can be analyzed using so-called a story grammar, which identifies components such as the setting and a logical event structure (e.g., initiating event, internal response, plan, action, consequence, reaction; Stein & Glenn, 1979). Macrostructural performance is seen as less language dependent than microstructure performance, because it is suggested that macrostructure is partly dependent on cognitive schemas (Iluz-Cohen & Walters, 2012; Pearson, 2002). Microstructure needs to be newly acquired for every language because every language has different vocabulary necessary to tell a story. 5.2.2 Measuring narrative ability with the MAIN With the MAIN protocol, data on microstructure level as well as macrostructure level can be obtained at the same time. Since the publication of the MAIN, several studies have been published using this instrument. However, caution is necessary when comparing the results of studies using the MAIN, as is demonstrated in the overview in Pesco and Kay-Raining Bird (2016) of the first eight published studies using the MAIN. The studies were difficult to compare because there was a lack of uniformity in the use of the instrument and there were differences in the populations. Even though studies using the MAIN are hard to 12 In Chapter 3 this research question was written as sub-question (b).  


































































































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