Page 164 - Second language development of newly arrived migrant kindergarteners - Frederike Groothoff

164 Chapter 7 other languages than Dutch were only used between peers who knew that other language, which could be considered an indication of sociocultural awareness. The question to answer next would be: “what is more helpful for learning? Peer- interaction or Teacher-Focal Pupil Interaction?” Based on the analysis of the language, both teachers and peers use simple language when talking to the focal pupils, thus what difference would one type of interaction over the other make? Blum-Kulka and Gorbatt (2014) found that “the facilitating role of peer interaction has an important time constraint: it is not available to the L2 children as long as they have not mastered at least rudimentary modes of communication in the new language and do not have enough confidence to use them” (Blum-Kulka & Gorbatt, 2014, p. 192). The timing of our data collection could have been a confounding factor: The pupils were observed within the first six months of their stay in the school and thus might still be in the “silent” period or in the period in which they play along and only simple language would be sufficient. Unfortunately, by using only a snapshot procedure without recording the conversations it is difficult to reanalyze the specific conversations and compare the simple language used by teachers and used by peers. With regard to our field notes, there are both indications of differences and similarities between and within the different school types. Even though all DL2-schools use comparable approaches to teach vocabulary, there are differences regarding the number of words they taught per day. Some Mainstream schools use the same approach to teach vocabulary as the DL2-schools. Whereas some Mainstream schools focus explicitly on vocabulary learning, which can be seen on the walls in the classroom with many word clusters decorating the walls, others lack all these methods. A final remark should be given to the use of languages other than Dutch. The amount of non-Dutch was on average not higher than 8%, although one school had a percentage of 21.8 %. Even though numerous authors described the benefits of maintaining home languages and supporting their development in education (e.g. Baker 2011; Cummins 2001; Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000), the role of the home languages in the different schools was very limited across the two school types. “Inclusive curricula integrate the language dimension comprehensively and go beyond a simple opposition between monolingual and bilingual educational models or mother tongue versus foreign language” (Herzog- Punzenberger, Le Pichon-Vorstman, & Siarova, 2017, p. 9). According to Herzog- Punzenberger et al. multilingual pupils need inclusive curricula, but this was hardly reflected in the classrooms during our observations: only one of the teachers in our study utilized the multilingual repertoire of the pupils, however no teacher made reference to one of the home language for comparisons with Dutch. Furthermore, no positive attention was given by the teachers on the use of the home language by the pupils, for example when the teacher saw that the pupils were engaged in a discussion about a book they were reading. All in all, the teachers seem to be unaware about practices how to include other languages