The vocabulary development of newly arrived migrant pupils is more than a growing number of words!

This study focuses on vocabulary development of Newly Arrived Migrant pupilS (NAMS) in different language education programs in the Netherlands. In the first part of this presentation I will briefly explain the educational system concerning the education of NAMS in the Netherlands. These pupils are sometimes educated in special language programs to support their Dutch L2 vocabulary development, but in some regions they enter the regular Dutch system on arrival. The second part of my presentation focuses on my PhD-study investigating the language development of NAMS aged 4 to 6 years old. I tested them twice for their receptive and productive vocabulary during their first year in the Netherlands, with approximately three months in between, I also tested them once in their second year. For receptive vocabulary I used the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (Dunn & Dunn, 2005). In raw score almost all pupils grew, but the standard scores and percentiles did not. The first analysis of the data in the first year does not show a significant differences between children from the different educational settings. The productive vocabulary was tested using MAIN (the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives, Gagarina et al. 2012) and it revealed interesting differences but specifically in the area of child characteristics. I will present the longitudinal analyses of the video-recordings using the regular MAIN scoring instrument and an additional scoring scheme. This alternative scheme takes into account additional communication strategies than strictly verbal ones, which should be considered during narrative assessment of emerging bilingual pupils. Even though the children in this study had limited verbal abilities in their L2, many of them were willing to communicate and showed meta-communicative awareness.Dunn, L.M. & Dunn, L.M. (2005). Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-III-NL, Nederlandse versie door Liesbeth Schlichting. Harcourt Assessment B.V., AmsterdamGagarina, N., Klop, D., Kunnari, S., Tantele, S., Välimaa, T., Balciuniene, I., Bohnacker, U. & Walters, J. (2012) MAIN: Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives. © ZAS Papers in Linguistics, 56.