Page 133 - Second language development of newly arrived migrant kindergarteners - Frederike Groothoff

Pedagogical practices: focus on teacher behavior 133 vocabulary scores. One goal of Veen et al. (2017) was also to see whether there were differences in process quality between teachers who used an officially acknowledged early care program compared to teacher who used a different program: no differences were found. Other research with the CLASS in the Netherlands focused on younger children compared to this study and therefore used a different version of the CLASS, the Toddler version. In that version of the CLASS, two domains can be distinguished: (1) Emotional and behavioral support and (2) instructional support. For Emotional and Behavioral Support medium and high scores are reported compared to low to medium scores for instructional support (Slot, 2014; Leseman & Slot, 2013; Veen et al., 2013; Van Schaik, Leseman, & De Haan, 2018). The use of a specific program which would stimulate the development of focal pupils was analyzed by Slot and Leseman (2013) in relation to the dimensions of the CLASS Toddler. They found that the use of special program did not have a systematic relation with the emotional or educational process quality. All in all, what these studies show about Dutch kindergarten classroom is that instructional support should improve the most, compared to emotional support and organizational support. For example teachers give pupils the opportunity to brainstorm on ideas, but they do not stimulate to execute the ideas and to evaluate their predictions. Another example is that teachers do follow-up on a question, but they do not persist in the exchange with a child, after one response a different child is questioned. Even though the scores on language modeling are not the lowest, Henrichs and Leseman (2016) report that the most given advice was on how to improve the way teachers can stimulate language development. 6.3 Method 6.3.1 Participants In the present chapter concerning teacher behavior the teachers of the 42 participating pupils in Chapter 4 and 5 participated. Seventeen female teachers from ten different schools agreed to be observed with the CLASS, see Table 6.1 (see also Section 3.4.1 in Chapter 3 for more details on the participating schools and teachers).