Page 72 - Second language development of newly arrived migrant kindergarteners - Frederike Groothoff

72 Chapter 4 4.1 Introduction This dissertation was set up to evaluate the possible impact of the organization of educational settings on the second language development of newly arrived migrant kindergarteners. In order to do so, first the pupils’ language development had to be investigated. In this chapter, the focus is on receptive vocabulary, and Chapter 5 focusses on narrative ability. The combination of these two methods of assessment is related to the concept of communicative competence. Communication Competence aims to assess language on the basis of four segments: linguistic competence, sociocultural competence, discourse competence, and strategic competence (following from Canale, 1983; Celce- Murcia, Dörnyei, & Thurrell, 1995; see Chapter 2). Receptive vocabulary relates to the first segment, linguistic competence. Receptive vocabulary is defined as the number of different words (verbs, nouns, and adjectives) a child can identify, as measured by the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test for Dutch (PPVT-III-NL; Schlichting, 2005). The PPVT is a standardized receptive vocabulary test that measures vocabulary size. In the PPVT, the participant hears a target word and has to choose the correct referent out of a set of four pictures. Productive vocabulary, in contrast, is the number of different words a child can produce orally, or that older pupils can write. In Chapter 5, productive vocabulary will be measured by assessing the narrative ability of forty-two pupils using the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (abbreviated as MAIN; Gagarina et al., 2012). Following the protocol, the participants need to tell a story by means of a six-picture sequence. The focus of the present chapter is the newly arrived migrant pupils’ receptive vocabulary development and the possible differences in this development between pupils in DL2-schools and Mainstream schools. The following research question is central: How does the Dutch receptive vocabulary (in Dutch) of newly arrived migrant kindergarteners develop during the first years of schooling in the Netherlands related to school type?10 The present chapter is structured as follows: first, we give a brief review of the literature of what is already known about receptive vocabulary development of newly arrived migrant pupils; then we discuss the data collection:, a the methodology and results of data collected from forty-two participants is presented. The chapter ends with a discussion, which will be extended in Chapter 9. 10 In Chapter 3 this research question was written as sub-question (a).