Page 208 - Second language development of newly arrived migrant kindergarteners - Frederike Groothoff

208 Chapter 9 9.1 Introduction In this final chapter, we start (Section 9.1) with an overview of the most important results for the two areas under investigation: the second language development of newly arrived migrant kindergarteners and the quality of their learning environment. Following this, the link between the second language development and the school learning environment and is summarized (Section 9.2.). We then continue with the discussion of our results and how they help answer our main research question and research sub-questions (Section 9.3). We also dedicate a section (Section 9.4) to the implications our findings have for the education of newly arrived migrant pupils. Subsequently, we discuss the limitations of our study and we give directions for future research (Section 9.5). We end this final chapter with some remarks and a final conclusion (Section 9.6). 9.2 Overview of the results 9.2.1 Receptive vocabulary development In Chapter 4 the focus was about receptive vocabulary development. The receptive vocabulary of 42 newly arrived migrant kindergarteners was measured four times over two- and-a-half years with the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test for Dutch (PPVT; Schlichting, 2005). The main findings were as follows:  Over the two-and-a-half years there was an increase of receptive vocabulary; however, this development was quadratic: it increased more quickly in the beginning but then it leveled off.  The more Exposure to Dutch at School, the higher the scores on the receptive vocabulary test. However, the amount of time spent attending a Dutch School had a greater effect on the receptive vocabulary size of younger pupils than that of older pupils.  When the receptive vocabulary scores of pupils who attended DL2-schools were compared with the receptive vocabulary scores of pupils who attended Mainstream schools, no difference was found. 9.2.2 Narrative ability development. In Chapter 5 the focus was on narrative ability development. The narrative ability of 42 newly arrived migrant kindergarteners was measured four times over two-and-a-half years with the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN; Gagarina et al., 2012). We looked at narrative ability on two levels: the microstructural level and the macrostructural level. For microstructure, we measured lexical diversity (Number of Different Words and Guiraud Index Score) and lexical richness (Measure of Lexical