Page 128 - Second language development of newly arrived migrant kindergarteners - Frederike Groothoff

128 Chapter 5 With our data we have shown how the narratives of 42 newly arrived migrant pupils in their second language developed. There was only one effect of Educational Facility and that was an interaction between Age and Education Facility for the NDW; for younger pupils the influence of Educational Facility is larger, than for older pupils on the NDW. However, due to our small sample size, this interaction affect should be reproduced by another study in order to be validated. This chapter with data on a narrative task was included in this dissertation in order to collect information on the productive second language development of newly arrived kindergarteners. With the analysis of the microstructure and the macrostructure of the stories we captured the linguistic competence as well as the discourse competence. The outcome that the inclusion of type of Educational Facility did not have a clear-cut effect on any of the measures of narrative ability in this chapter, or on the receptive vocabulary as was found in Chapter 4, seems to justify a more detailed investigation of the school learning environment. Being at a DL2-school or at a Mainstream school in itself does not seem to have a large differential effect on the second language development of newly arrived migrant kindergarteners, regarding receptive vocabulary and narrative ability as measured with PPVT (Chapter 4) and MAIN (Chapter 5). However, there could be certain aspects of the schools’ environments that differ between the types, and which could be influencing factors on language development. Chapter 6 and 7 will investigate how the school learning environment of newly arrived migrant pupils is composed, with a focus on pedagogical practices. After that, in Chapter 8, the General Development Models of the receptive vocabulary and the narrative ability measures will return and then they will be related to the specific significant characteristics of the school learning environment from Chapter 6 and 7.