Page 221 - Second language development of newly arrived migrant kindergarteners - Frederike Groothoff

General discussion and conclusions 221 the academic aspects of a new language requires a period of 5–7 years (Cummins, 2008), it is important that future studies with newly arrived migrant pupils keep detailed track not only of the activities and interactions these pupils have on different occasions within that first year, but also in later years when they attend a mainstream school. This is especially so since it is expected that the interactions in the school learning environment change over time. For example Cekaite and Aronsson (2014) and Tabors and Snow (1994) found that during the first months at school a second language learner might only experience basic interaction. Furthermore, we knew that by using the snapshot method the way we did, important information was lost since it is an on the spot method without recordings of the actual interactions and language use on tape. For our study we believe that this method was sufficient, but it is recommendable that future research will record the actual speech of and around the focal pupil and investigate how language learning can occur from the input a language learner receives per day, which is of course really complicated to achieve with current privacy regulations. This is however especially important since peer learning is an argument I often heard during the orientation phase of the present study used by mainstream schools for not having segregated facilities. Nowadays, in my new job as peripatetic language support advisor (in Dutch: ambulant taalondersteuner) I still hear teachers talk about the positive influence of peers on the second language development of newly arrived migrant pupils. However teachers do not seem to realize that peers can only be helpful to second language learners when these peers have developed specific capacities to be helpful for these learners. Researchers should make teachers aware off this and give them tools to support peers in this. Additionally, researchers should provide teachers with information on how to specifically target effective communicative attempts of the second learners themselves (Blum-Kulka & Snow, 2004). The use of CLASS and the snapshot method provided us with valuable information about the pedagogical practices in classrooms of newly arrived migrant pupils. However, we feel that these observational tools could be more specified for working with second language learners and should focus more on specific pedagogical practices which are proven to be effective for the language learning of newly arrived migrant pupils, such as the functional use of the home languages in the classroom and the use of scaffolding to make the language input at the same time richer but also more comprehensible. Since the scores on Emotional Support are already in the higher ranges it might be interesting to focus more on the Instructional support domain of CLASS and give observers more indicators of good teacher behavior to evaluate this domain when second language learners part of the group. In this dissertation the focus was on differences between the learning environment of DL2-schools and Mainstream schools. However, our data could also be interpreted without this distinction, thereby analyzing second language development of newly arrived