Page 88 - Second language development of newly arrived migrant kindergarteners - Frederike Groothoff
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88 Chapter 5 5.1 Introduction The overall goal of our overarching study is to explore the possible influence of the school learning environment on the second language development in the early years of schooling in the new country. First, the second language development itself is investigated in more detail. In the initial stages the focus of this dissertation was on vocabulary development. The selection of a productive vocabulary task was challenging, as we aimed at incorporating a truly communicative task. Therefore, in the sub-study in this chapter, we investigated the development of narrative ability of the same forty-two newly arrived migrant kindergarteners as in Chapter 4. By adding data on narrative ability to receptive vocabulary development data, we aim to cover the whole communicative competence theory as defined by Canale, (1983) and Celce-Murcia et al., (1995; see Chapter 2) namely these four segments: linguistic competence, sociocultural competence, discourse competence, and strategic competence. While receptive vocabulary relates to linguistic competence, narrative ability taps not only into linguistic competence but also into discourse competence, sociocultural competence, and strategic competence. Moreover, when including children with multilingual repertoires, researchers should be careful in the selection of their tasks. According to different researchers (e.g. Cleave, Girolametto, Chen, & Johnson, 2010; Boerma, Leseman, Timmermeister, Wijnen, & Blom, 2016; Paradis, Genesee, & Crago, 2011) narrative tasks are less biased for multilingual participants because narratives do not only tap into language specific knowledge; Narratives ask for general skills such as cognitive, social, and pragmatic skills (Liles, 1993). Narrative ability can be measured by different types of tasks. Namely, narratives can be recorded in different ways: spontaneous or elicited. Since this present study aims to investigate the development of narrative ability there was a need for a relatively controlled setting which would enable a comparable analysis of the stories between participants and over time within one participant. Therefore, the data for this study on narrative development was collected using the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (abbreviated as MAIN; Gagarina et al., 2012). The MAIN consists of picture sequences which are used to elicit speech in a more controlled way compared to spontaneous non- guided speech. In the present study the Dutch version of the MAIN is used. The foci of the present chapter are (1) the newly arrived migrant pupils’ narrative ability development and (2) the possible differences in this development between pupils in DL2-schools and Mainstream schools. The following research question is central: 


































































































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