Page 41 - Second language development of newly arrived migrant kindergarteners - Frederike Groothoff

2.5 Receptive vocabulary development The development of receptive vocabulary in the first language of young children has been widely studied (for a review see Law and Roy, 2008). The acquisition of vocabulary is often perceived as effortless by most parents and even by school teachers. First language vocabulary acquisition starts from birth and continues developing through at least the age of 12. In the preschool years, at the age of 3 and 4, children learn several words a day (Lightbown & Spada, 2013). After the age of 12 the development of vocabulary continues throughout adulthood (de Villiers & de Villiers, 1979). 2.5.1 Receptive vocabulary development of second language learners According to Golberg et al. (2008) the development of vocabulary is “a cornerstone” (Golberg et al., 2008, p. 41) of acquiring the new language for second language learners since it is important for their educational success overall. That is, the development of age- appropriate oral proficiency and literacy skills depends heavily on a vocabulary of sufficient size. The order of acquisition of words (first nouns, then verbs and social expressions) seems to be similar for second language learners compared to first language learners as was established in, for example, a study on Turkish-Dutch (Özcan, Altinkamiş, & Gillis, 2016) and Moroccan-Dutch children (Boerma, 2005). The learning of a second language takes time, nevertheless, Golberg et al. (2008) followed 19 second language learners who were on average about 5 years old when starting to learn English and found that after 34 months of exposure to English their results on a vocabulary test met native-speaker expectations. Van Druten-Frietman, Denessen, Gijsel, and Verhoeven (2015) showed that pupils with a non-Dutch background (two-and-a-half to three-and-a-half years old) had lower vocabulary scores than their Dutch peers. However, their growth rate was steeper but not steep enough to have overcome the gap with their peers in one year. Comparable were the conclusions in a study of Verhagen et al. (2016) with participants aged two- to six-year- olds. Participants with a non-Western ethnicity or a different home language had, generally speaking, a lower vocabulary level. However, also these children had a stronger growth rate and therefore the gap between the two groups decreased. Nevertheless, at the age of five the gap was still significant. Compared to monolingual children, bilingual children know fewer words in each of their languages (e.g., Leseman, 2000; Bialystok, Luk, Peets, & Yang, 2010; Oller, Pearson, & Cobo-Lewis, 2007). This is caused by the fact that they must divide their language learning time over all their languages. Furthermore, it is likely that one of their languages was learned or is used in one specific context and not in another. On the other hand, when all vocabularies of the languages of a multilingual child are combined it seems to be comparably large, or even larger than the vocabulary size of a monolingual child (Bialystok et al., 2010). Theoretical perspectives 41