Page 43 - Second language development of newly arrived migrant kindergarteners - Frederike Groothoff

Theoretical perspectives 43 no longitudinal data was obtained, conclusions could only be drawn from one observation with the PPVT: 59.8% of the participants scored below the mean compared to the norm group. All pupils but one scored below their age appropriate score. For 40.5% of the participants, no percentile score could be obtained because their raw score was too low compared to the norm tables. Of the participants, 48.7% had a percentile score below 10%, meaning that 90% of the norm group scored higher. Only four pupils scored higher than 10%, with scores of 14, 19, 47, and 58 percent. This study shows, as expected, that newly arrived migrant pupils have a smaller receptive vocabulary compared to monolingual peers. It also shows that the norms used in standardized assessments are not easily applicable to second language learners. To summarize, one may say that receptive vocabulary size is a significant predictor of academic achievement and that the learning of vocabulary in the second language should be the focus of schooling during several years. There are however many influencing factors enhancing or limiting the development of vocabulary. To our knowledge, no research has been carried out with the newly arrived migrant group in the Netherlands who start with no knowledge of the target language. The question therefore is: How does the receptive vocabulary of newly arrived migrant kindergarteners develop during their first years in a Dutch learning environment? 2.6 Narrative ability development Receptive vocabulary knowledge is only one part of a person’s language ability. The theory of communicative competence encourages researchers to investigate as many aspects of language development as possible to get a more complete picture of someone’s ability. When measuring narrative ability, data can be obtained not only about linguistic competence (which words does a child use?) but also about discourse competence (is the child able to tell a coherent story?). The ability to tell a story is essential for academic learning, since for example, the ability to tell a story is one of the fundamentals of a child’s literacy skills is. (e.g., Bishop & Edmundson, 1987; Bliss, McCabe, & Miranda, 1998; Gutiérrez-Clellen, 2002; Hayward & Schneider, 2000; McCabe & Rosenthal Rollins, 1994; Swanson, Fey, Mills, & Hood, 2005; Torrance & Olson, 1984; Wallach, 2008). Furthermore, narratives are implicated in positive social exchanges (Liles, 1993). That is, a speaker needs to be able to tell about a series of events in a structured way to make clear to the listener what has happened to whom and why. Given the importance of narratives for academics as well as for social relationships, narratives are increasingly used as an assessment tool for children, including at-risk young children (Spencer & Slocum, 2010) and bilinguals (see also Maviş, Tunçer, & Gagarina, 2016). Narrative assessments provide rich linguistic data and are ecologically valid (Botting, 2002), providing a relatively natural context of data elicitation. Furthermore,