Page 165 - Second language development of newly arrived migrant kindergarteners - Frederike Groothoff

165 Pedagogical practices: focus on focal pupils’ experiences than Dutch, especially when the teacher herself/himself cannot understand or speak those languages. With our data we showed that there were differences in the percentage of use of languages other than Dutch: languages other than Dutch seemed to be used more often by pupils at Mainstream schools compared to pupils at DL2-schools. These differences were only on the level of language during Peer Interaction. However, these differences were not significant because there was mainly one school which had an extreme score in this category. At the time of the observations, deliberately including home languages in the daily activities was not part of the official school policy of any of the schools in the study. Additionally, in the field notes it was noted that teachers from different schools, including the school with a high number of pupils using languages other than Dutch, reacted with comments like, “Shh, at school we only speak Dutch” when pupils used their home languages amongst each other. It is recommended in the literature that home languages are used constructively to let pupils show their capabilities before they have mastered Dutch vocabulary fully. With this they would not need to go through a long “silent” period. Furthermore, paying positive attention to the home languages of the pupils has socio- emotional benefits (Cummins, 2007). We would like to add the following to the section on rater reliability (in Section 7.3.4): The observations with the snapshot procedure were collected by one observer, thus no interrater reliability could have been calculated. We choose to have one trained observer instead of two, since an additional observer would require an extra researcher with a laptop be present in the classroom, or that everything that happened in the classroom would be recorded. An additional researcher in the classroom is not favorable since it is already crowded in kindergarten classrooms and it might have disturbed the class routines. To make video recordings of everything that happened in the classroom was also not possible since this would have required multiple sophisticated recording devices which were not available. Even if they had been available, there is no guarantee that permission would have been obtained from all parents of all children in each class. This dissertation will now continue with Chapter 8 in which the data about the characteristics of the school learning environment, reported in Chapter 6 and 7, are used to analyze the receptive vocabulary development (from Chapter 4) and narrative ability development (from Chapter 5). The analysis in Chapter 8 will show whether the school learning environment characteristics that differed significantly between the two school types, – the score on the dimensions Positive Climate and Regard for Student perspectives and the domain Emotional Support (from Chapter 6) and the amount of time engaged in Language and Mathematical Activities, the proportion of Language Situations with Peers, Balanced Language Situations, Peer Interaction, and Teacher-Focal Pupil interaction (from Chapter 7) – have had an effect on the receptive vocabulary development or narrative ability development of the young newly arrived migrant pupils in focus.