Page 146 - Second language development of newly arrived migrant kindergarteners - Frederike Groothoff

146 Chapter 7 7.1 Introduction In Chapter 6 the pedagogical practices in (1) DL2-schools and (2) Mainstream schools were observed from the point of view of teacher behavior, focusing on whole class teacher-pupil interactions. Whereas teacher-pupil interactions on the general level in the classroom are an important indication of the school learning environment, the specific focal pupils’ experiences might reveal important additional information. Thus in order to get a complete picture of the school learning environment it is important to additionally look at the interactions of our focal pupils with their teacher and their peers in the classroom. Commonly used in studies observing classroom activities is a “snapshot procedure”: taking observations at regular intervals of what is going on around a pupil and then coding this. In both Chapter 6 and 7 the school learning environment of newly arrived migrant kindergarteners is investigated; however, while in Chapter 6 the focus was on teacher behavior, the present chapter will focus on specifically the experiences of the newly arrived migrant kindergarteners in the classroom, our focal pupils. The central question of Chapter 7 is therefore: What are the differences in characteristics of the school learning environment from the point of view of focal pupils’ experiences between DL2-schools and Mainstream schools?18 The present chapter is structured as follows: before discussing the data collection, a brief review is given about what is already known about the influence of focal pupil’s experiences in education on child-outcomes, specifically focusing on research with a snapshot observation instrument (Section 7.2). Then the methodology (Section 7.3) and results (Section 7.4) of data collected from 42 participants from ten different schools is discussed. The chapter ends (Section 7.5) with a summary and discussion, which will be extended in Chapter 9. 7.2 Pedagogical practices: focus on focal pupils’ experiences There are different approaches to measure and observe the quality of education by looking at interactions in a classroom. For example, Peisner-Feinberg et al. (2014) reviewed ten studies on quality in early childcare and half of these studies used some kind of snapshot procedure. However, there are multiple ways to make use of snapshots in the classroom. For example, a structured observation protocol initiated every 15 minutes (Jacoby & Lesaux, 2017), or every 30 minutes (Stegelin, Anderson, Kemper, Wagner, & Evans, 2014) in which anecdotal notes were taken and after which quantitative time sampling measures were recorded in an appropriate category. Also, analysis of whole morning video 18 This research question was written in Chapter 3 as sub-question (d).