Page 140 - Second language development of newly arrived migrant kindergarteners - Frederike Groothoff

140 Chapter 6 teachers. The difference between her and the other teachers was that she repeated answers and she extended words and concepts more frequently. The teachers who had the lowest scores on the domain Instructional Support were two teachers at the same DL2-school, with mean scores of 2.17. They scored particularly low on the dimension Concept Development. They did not ask many ‘how’ or ‘why’ questions and in conversations there was little room for making connections with the real world, for problem solving, or for brainstorming on ideas. The quality of feedback could be improved if they would give feedback on the learning or thinking process instead of on the results. Also the persistence of the teacher in given feedback and having a reciprocally exchange with the pupils will improve the quality of the feedback. The language development of the pupils could be stimulated if there would be more back and forth conversation and expansion on pupils’ utterances. 6.5 Summary and conclusion The purpose of this chapter was to investigate what characterizes the school learning environment for newly arrived migrant kindergarteners at the classroom level, especially concerning differences between DL2-schools and Mainstream schools. To study this, the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) was used to measure the quality of several dimensions of teacher-child interactions in the different classrooms. The research question which was central to this chapter was: what are the differences in characteristics of the school learning environment regarding teacher behavior between DL2-schools and Mainstream schools? We found 2 out of 10 possible significant effects. Table 6.3 gives an overview of the results. Table 6.3: Overview of Significant Pairwise Contrasts for Scores on the CLASS. Emotional support Positive Climate Negative Climate Teacher Sensitivity Regard for Student Perspectives Organizational Support Behavior Management Productivity Instructional Learning Formats Instructional support Concept Development Quality of Feedback Language Modeling Higher in Mainstream schools Higher in Mainstream schools