Page 203 - Second language development of newly arrived migrant kindergarteners - Frederike Groothoff

The influence of the school learning environment 203 8.4.1 The influence of the school learning environment: focusing on teacher behavior With our analysis we could show that the result found in Chapter 6 about Positive Climate – that Mainstream schools teachers score higher on the dimension Positive Climate compared to DL2-school teachers – influenced the PPVT score and the MLR score. A positive interaction between Age and Positive Climate was found for the receptive vocabulary scores, but a negative interaction between Age and Positive Climate was found for the MLR score. Meaning that a positive classroom climate provided by the teacher has a stronger effect on older pupils’ receptive vocabulary scores than on younger pupils’ scores, while a positive classroom climate provided by the teacher has a stronger effect on younger pupils compared to older pupils regarding the Measure of Lexical Richness scores. However, since the main effects of Positive Climate were not significant (due to large standard errors) it is difficult to interpret these effects. In Chapter 6 on teacher behavior we found that that Mainstream schools teachers scored higher on the dimension Regard for Student Perspectives compared to DL2-school teachers. However in our analysis in Chapter 8 we did not find that Regard for Student Perspectives was a significant predictor of the difference in any of the language measures. We only found two out of the ten differences in teacher behavior in the different school types to have a significant effect on our language measures. This might be explained by the fact that Positive Climate and Regard for Student Perspectives are not the main aspects of teacher behavior that influence language learning. Dimensions in the domain of Instructional Support are more often predictors of differences in development. However, since we focused in this dissertation on differences in school type we only considered these two variables of teacher behavior in our analysis. For more information on the influence of teacher behavior on second language development in general the data could be analyzed again including all the other dimensions. 8.4.2 The influence of the school learning environment: focusing on focal pupils’ experiences In Chapter 7 we found that pupils at DL2-school were more engaged in Mathematical Activities compared to pupils at Mainstream schools. In our analysis in Chapter 8 we found that the percentage of time spent in Mathematical Activities had a significant negative effect on the Guiraud Index Score. Pupils who spent more time on Mathematical Activities used less diverse language when telling stories. Furthermore, in Chapter 7 we found that pupils at DL2-school were more often engaged in Language Activities compared to pupils at Mainstream schools. The percentage of time spent in Language Activities was found to influence the Number of Different Words, but it was an interaction between Age and the percentages of Language Activities. The effect of the percentage of time spent in Language Activities on NDW was larger for older pupils compared to younger pupils. However, since the main effect of Language