Page 170 - Second language development of newly arrived migrant kindergarteners - Frederike Groothoff

170 Chapter 8 The characteristics of the school learning environment were identified using observations of the pedagogical practices in the classrooms of the kindergarteners. First the focus will be on the pedagogical practices based on teacher behavior, followed by the pedagogical practices based on the experiences of the focal pupils. The central question in this chapter concerns the relation between the observations of pedagogical practices in the classroom based on teacher behavior and pupil’s language scores. These pedagogical practices will be introduced in the Multi-Level Models to explain differences in learning growth between pupils. Therefore, we build growth models in the same way as reported in Chapter 4. Unfortunately, for some teachers the observations of their behavior were made after the pupils took the tests. Therefore, these observations cannot be used for our analysis of the relation between teacher behavior and language outcomes. Consequently, these observations are not taken into account in the present chapter. The pedagogical variables were added to the model in two ways: as a main effect and as an interaction effect with Age. The former indicates that the pupils’ PPVT scores increase (or decrease) due to differences in scores by their teachers on a pedagogical variable. The latter effect indicates that the influence of a pedagogical variable depends on the age of the pupils. 8.2.1 Pedagogical practices: focusing on teacher behavior The pedagogical practices at the classroom level were investigated by observing the teacher with the CLASS (Pianta, La Paro, & Hamre, 2008); see Chapters 3 and 6 for the description of the participants, method, procedure, and results. Due to logistical issues, some observations of the teachers took place after the assessment of the first (or first two) receptive vocabulary assessments of pupils with the PPVT. In total, fifty PPVT scores mainly from Session 0 were taken out of the analyses. Most of these language measures were taken out of the analysis because they were collected “too early” and had to be removed. However, there were also two teachers (each with two focal pupils in the classroom) who could not be observed, one due to illness, the other because of conflicting interests21, and thus the collected language data of their pupils could also not be taken into account in the analysis. Thus, in total 118 cases from 38 different pupils could be taken into account (compared to 168 in the first General Development Model of PPVT), and therefore a new developmental model had to be modelled with these 118 cases. 21 This second class was the class of the researcher herself and it seemed inappropriate to make observations of her direct colleague in her own class. The pupils in the classroom which the researcher herself taught twice a week might behave differently while she was in the classroom compared to regular days with only the other teacher. Also it could be more difficult for the researcher to observe in the moment without taking into account the behavior she might have witnessed during the days she teaches these pupils herself.