Page 175 - Second language development of newly arrived migrant kindergarteners - Frederike Groothoff

The influence of the school learning environment 175 function of Age; differences between older individuals are smaller than those between younger pupils. Chapter 7, about the pedagogical practices in the classroom focusing on the focal pupils, revealed that six aspects of the school learning environment, as measured by the snapshot method, showed significant differences between the two school types. The individual pupil’s percentages of time spent engaged in these six types of activities, language situations, or interaction settings (Language Activities, Mathematical Activities, Language Situation with Peers, Balanced Language Situation, Peer Interactions, and Teacher-Focal Pupil Interaction) were added one by one to the new General Development Model of PPVT, to see whether these aspects of the school learning environment were significant predictors of differences in pupils’ PPVT development. However, the addition of the six variables from the Snapshot did not contribute significantly to the fit of the model to the observed data. This means that we could not show that the fact that there were differences between the school types in time spent by the pupils in these six activities, language situations, or interaction settings influenced their PPVT development. 8.3 The influence of the school learning environment on narrative ability development In this section the significant variables from the school learning environment, observed in Chapter 6 and 7, will be related to the individual development of the narrative ability of newly arrived migrant kindergarteners (using the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives, abbreviated as MAIN; Gagarina et al., 2012) answering the second part of the research question: To what extent do differences in the characteristics of the school learning environment during the first year after arrival relate to narrative ability development of newly arrived migrant kindergarteners during the first two-and-a-half years of schooling in the Netherlands? The characteristics of the school learning environment were identified based on the observations of the pedagogical practices in the classrooms of the kindergarteners. First the relation between narrative ability and pedagogical practices concerning teacher behavior will be discussed. Then the relation between the pedagogical practices concerning focal pupils’ experiences will be discussed. In the following sections all six aspects of narrative ability obtain by using the MAIN will be investigated. First the three microstructural elements: Number of Different Words, Guiraud Index Score, and Measure of Lexical Richness will be modelled. Then the three macrostructural elements will be modelled: Story Structure, Structural Complexity, and use of Internal State Terms. As in Chapter 5, developmental models of each of the six narrative aspects will be built and compared to see whether the model fit improved. The pedagogical variables are added to the models in two ways: as main effect and as an interaction effect with Age. The former indicates that the narrative measure scores increase (or decrease) due to differences