Page 219 - Second language development of newly arrived migrant kindergarteners - Frederike Groothoff

General discussion and conclusions 219 languages among the pupils in the school (a.o., Gielen & Işçi, 2015; Groothoff, in press; Slembrouck, Van Avermaet, & Van Gorp, 2018). 9.5 Limitations and future research This study comes with several limitations. The following are discussed in this section: the compilation of our group of participants, the instruments and followed procedures that were used, and finally, the incomplete use of the communicative competence theory. In this discussion we will also give suggestions how to overcome these limitations in future research. 9.5.1 Participants In Chapter 3, which concerned the participants in this study, it was already mentioned that here was skewness in the distribution of the participants. The lack of differences in score between the two school types could have been caused by the fact that we had only a small and skewed population. A better representation of DL2-schools and classes and more pupils attending a Mainstream school would have been preferable. This would have only been possible if the research had been undertaken by a larger research groups since it is impossible for one researcher alone to execute all the observations and assessments necessary to test a larger. In this study the influencing factors Age, Exposure to Dutch at School, and Educational Facility were studied, but there are many more factors that might play a role in the language development of newly arrived migrant pupils. For example, detailed information on their first language development, use and proficiency, socioeconomic status, maternal education, and quantity and quality of the input of the second language could have been included (for a list of determinants on language development, see Sorensen Duncan, 2017). Furthermore, additional information on motivation, language aptitude, learning style, learning strategies, and other general cognitive ability, preferably language- independent, might also help to explain individual differences. In the present study the number of background variables was kept to a minimum because we did not want to burden the teachers and parents with interviews or questionnaires; teachers might not be willing to participate in our study due to their already heavy workload and to interview parents of newly arrived migrant pupils requires a lot of time and preferably interpreters in numerous home languages. Finally, the participants in the present study were very young and therefore not a reliable source of information themselves. Thus, since it is a challenge to gather information on every possible influencing factor via parents and teachers, our recommendation for future research in this area would be to additionally apply special tools for measuring variables such as motivation and language aptitude for this specific group of young learners in order to make them informants on these influencing factors themselves.