Page 91 - Second language development of newly arrived migrant kindergarteners - Frederike Groothoff

Development of narrative ability 91 (2016) also showed significant improvement of macrostructure scores but in her study for Russian-German participants. She used a cross-sectional design with preschoolers, first graders and third graders. There were significant differences between all the age groups, although the difference between the preschoolers and first graders was larger than the difference between first graders and third graders. Gagarina thus showed that narrative ability still improves between these ages. Also, Maviş, Tunçer, and Gagarina, (2016) found that their younger group of Turkish-German children (age 2;11–3;11) and middle group (age 4;0–5;11) had significantly lower scores on story complexity than the older group (6;0–7;11). Interestingly, Story Structure and Internal State Terms did not show significant differences between the age groups. In the second study of Maviş et al. there was no age effect visible, but in that study, there were only two age groups with an age range of 5;5–7;0 and 7;1– 7;11, respectively. Thus, it seems that between the ages of five and seven narratives reach some kind of ceiling level. Based on the theoretical perspectives and previous studies concerning narrative ability development we hypothesized that given the age of the participants ( 4 to 6 years old) and the fact that we followed them for two-and-a-half years, we will see development of the macrostructure, as Bohnacker (2016) and Gagarina (2016) have shown. The results of our final assessment will show if the participants will reach a ceiling level at the end of our study, as was suggested by Maviş et al. (2016). However, it might be that the participants in the present study will show a different pattern of development, since their exposure to the second language is smaller than that of the participants in the previous studies with the MAIN. Furthermore, including multiple aspects of macrostructure in the present study might reveal whether the different macrostructural measures have identical developmental trajectories or not, as was suggested by Gagarina (2016). The inclusion of multiple microstructural components also contributes to a more in-depth study of pupils’ linguistic competence. All in all, the present study will use the MAIN as a measure for productive second language development, since it is considered to be a valid measure for second language learners. However, the goal of this study is not to replicate any previous study using the MAIN, but to contribute to the growing database of studies using the MAIN. The present study may be a valuable addition because we used the MAIN longitudinally, and it was used with pupils with only a small amount of exposure to the language of assessment.