Page 161 - Second language development of newly arrived migrant kindergarteners - Frederike Groothoff

161 Pedagogical practices: focus on focal pupils’ experiences around 35 schools we visited during this study we saw a sign that says: “in this school we speak Dutch.” Not during the snapshot observations but on another day the observer was present in one DL2-school she heard the teacher say "good morning” in Arabic, but there was no real enthusiastic response to this greeting by the students. The observer later asked the teacher if she uses Arabic regularly and she answered “as a team we have received eight lessons with a short introduction to Arabic, but due to my work load I have not been able to focus on this. I feel that I did not learn or remembered it. I did got the feeling how hard it is to learn such a new total foreign language!” This teacher also said to a pupil (not one of our focal pupils) “say it in Arabic” after which the child translated for a classmate. This teacher furthermore had a folder with some Arabic words translated to Dutch; she used it to say a color in Arabic to help a student pick the right color for her assignment. One of the teachers made a different remark about the various languages the pupils spoke. She said that even though she can understand and speak English she hardly uses it, because she finds it “unfair” towards pupils with a home language she cannot understand and speak. It was observed that the pupils spoke languages other than Dutch to each other and it seemed that the focal pupils and their peers with whom they these other language spoke could understand each other. It seemed that the focal pupils knew when and to whom they could speak their home language. An example of this is that at one point a Polish girl was arguing with a Polish boy in Polish and in a split second she turned around and complained about the boy to her teacher in Dutch. This example shows that this child has mastered sociocultural competence. Besides differences we also found similarities between the two school types. It was especially clear that one of the Mainstream schools used a strict word learning methodology like the one of the DL2-schools. This shows that making a distinction between whether or not second language learners are in a separate class may be less important than investigating the actual practices in the classroom. 7.5 Summary and conclusion The focus of this chapter was on the school learning environment of newly arrived migrant kindergarteners in the first year of their stay in the Netherlands. The main question to be answered was: 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? Observations of the focal pupils, by means of a snapshot procedure, were made in three categories: Activities, Interactions, and Language Use. First, concerning the answer to the question “in what kind of activity is the focal pupil engaged?” Most frequent were Language Activities. A considerable amount of time was also spent on routines without clear educational intention, on average about one fifth of