Page 53 - Second language development of newly arrived migrant kindergarteners - Frederike Groothoff

Theoretical perspectives 53 educational background. The overall result from the study by De Haan et al. was that educationally disadvantaged children benefit from a more balanced socioeconomic and ethnic-cultural classroom composition. The authors speculated that this finding was due to their interactions with peers with better expressive abilities and larger vocabularies. Furthermore, they suggested that a classroom with a more balanced composition would lower the workload for the teacher, which means she or he could spend more time guiding and instructing the children. De Haan et al. (2013) also found that using a special education program did not have a positive effect on disadvantaged children’s literacy and math development. However, this may point to a lack of implementation fidelity, since trained and non-trained teachers both provided language, literacy, and math activities in the classroom. Nevertheless, there were many differences in time spent in these different activities, which seemed to be crucial. They could not find a positive effect of having a special developed education program, but they did find a relation between time spent in language, literacy, and math activities on the one hand and child outcomes on the other hand. Thus the implementation of a certain program should be carefully be evaluated and actual time spent in activities should be measured. In 2009 a cohort study named “Pre-COOL” was started to investigate the societal benefits of the investments of ECE in the Netherlands (Veen et al., 2012a; 2012b). The intention of the study was to follow different cohorts of children attending early child care (or not) and see what impact attendance had on different outcomes. Furthermore, multiple variables of the educational facilities as well as child characteristics were included. Different studies on these cohorts will be reviewed here even though they do not specifically concern newly arrived migrant pupils. That is, second language learners were included in these cohorts, but newly arrived second language learners were not looked at separately. Nevertheless, we still discuss these studies since they can illustrate the general practices in the Netherlands; moreover, there could have been newly arrived migrant pupils included in these Pre-Cool studies, although not intentionally or explicitly. Leseman and Slot (2013) investigated the quality in two kinds of early child care and education facilities in the Netherlands to see how this quality influenced the language development of the children. First, they found an overall difference with international studies: even though instructional support scores were lower compared to emotional support in international studies, in the Dutch facilities this instructional support was even lower. Second, they saw little differences between facilities in the Netherlands concerning the emotional quality of the group processes; however, there were differences in the educational quality. The differences in outcome on emotional quality could be explained by the structural characteristic of group size and child-staff ratio. Level of education of the teacher did not seem to have a consistent relation with process quality. However, the amount of time spent in creative, educational, and play activities compared to time spent in routines could explain differences in both emotional as well as educational quality.