Page 77 - Second language development of newly arrived migrant kindergarteners - Frederike Groothoff

ab Figure 4.1a and 4.1b: Picture and Graphical Representation of the Assessment Set-up. 1: participant; 2: laptop; 3: researcher. The Dutch version of the PPVT has 180 items divided into 15 sets of 12 words increasing in difficulty to adapt to different age groups. Following the standard approach, a test session starts with the set appropriate for the pupil’s age at the time of testing. When the pupil has 5 or more incorrect answers on the starting set, a lower, easier set is administered until less than 4 mistakes are made. After that, the test session continues with the next higher set. The test stops when a pupil has made 9 or more mistakes in the last set. For example: a participant of 4;3 years old needs to start in Set 4 (the age appropriate level for participants between 4;0 and 4;5). However, when he or she makes five mistakes Set 3 is administered. In this set the child makes 3 mistakes and then the assessment is continued with Set 5. The test ends after Set 6 because the participant made 9 mistakes. However, because the pupils in the present study had less than a year of exposure to Dutch, we began our assessment in Session 0 for all pupils regardless of their age with the set with the lowest level, normally used for participants aged 2;3-2;5. We then continued with the next higher set until they made nine or more mistakes, the break off point from the standard protocol. Nine of the forty-two pupils made 9 errors or more before their age appropriate set was reached. At the second assessment, we used age-appropriate set as starting set. 4.3.4 Analyses Statistical analysis The PPVT provides a raw score, all correct answers, which can be converted to a standardized score from a table providing age-corrected normative scores. In our analysis of the receptive vocabulary development however, we used the raw scores of the PPVT instead of the standard scores, following the reasoning of Golberg, Paradis, and Crago Development of receptive vocabulary 77