Page 15 - Second language development of newly arrived migrant kindergarteners - Frederike Groothoff

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------- Clarification of Terms -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Communicative competence: Communicative competence is a central concept in language teaching: this concept puts the learner at the heart of his or her learning. It concerns the learner's ability to understand the content of the conversation and to express himself/herself in authentic communication situations, and in the context of this thesis, at school. Communicative competence includes four domains: linguistic, strategic, discursive and sociocultural (e.g., Savignon, 1976; Canale, 1983). Discourse competence: Discourse competence is part of communicative competence and implies combining grammatical forms and meanings to realize a cohesive and coherent piece of spoken or written text in different genres. For example, in the context of this thesis, learners must be able to tell a coherent story based on a picture sequence the interlocutor cannot see. DL2: Unlike foreign language learning, second language learning refers to learning the dominant language of the environment. Dutch as second language means that the Dutch language is learned on top of the languages that the child already knows. DL2-school: A school or class which is temporally (in general one to two years) attended by language learners with a focus on learning the second language. In the context of this thesis, Dutch is the only language of instruction. Guiraud Index Score: A measure of lexical diversity. It is calculated by dividing the number of types (different words) by the square root of the total of tokens (total number of words) of a story. Home language(s): The language(s) acquired, and often still spoken, in the family context. Internal State Terms: Internal state terms provide important information about the awareness of a narrator and his/her understanding of the story characters’ mental states: what they know, what they value, and what they believe e.g., see, hear, happy, think, hungry. Kindergarten: The first two years of Dutch primary education, called group 1 and 2. Pupils in Dutch kindergarten are generally four to six years old. In the Netherlands, since 1985, education begins with these two years of kindergarten integrated into primary education. In most other countries these two years are considered pre-primary.