Conference:
ECER 2009
Format:
Paper
Session Information
14 SES 10, Young Pupils' and Pre-school Children's Learning Environments: Quality, Context and Curriculum Issues
Paper Session
Time:
2009-09-30
14:45-16:15
Room:
JUR, HS 10
Chair:
Lisbeth Åberg-Bengtsson
Contribution
From their first day at school, children in the Netherlands are exposed to a specific register which is crucial in the context of schooling and which is different from the conversational language that is used in the home environment. This register, also called academic language, involves the use of language for specific, decontextualized and cognitively demanding communication in school-like contexts (Schleppegrell, 2004; Halliday, 1994). Academic language is characterized by the use of dense and diverse vocabulary, complex clause combing strategies and the use of specific (non-deictic) reference to time and space.
This study focuses on the development of some features of academic language of Moroccan-Berber children, whose L1 is Tarifit Berber (a language spoken in the North of Morocco), in the Netherlands at home and at school. First, a brief introduction will be given about the position of Moroccan children in the Dutch educational system. In addition, the concept of academic language and its importance in school success will be treated. Subsequently, the results will be presented.
To gain insight into the academic register mentioned above, the following research questions are formulated: Are there any differences between the input provided at home and at school to these children? Do socioeconomic status (SES) and home literacy practices influence the language use of the mothers? Are there differences in children’s output at home and at school?
Method
The corpus, which is used, is of naturally occurring speech collected from a sample of 12 3-6-year-old Moroccan-Berber children reading a picture book together with their mothers at home as well as their teachers at school. These children have been followed for a period of 3 years (longitudinal design). The aim of this study is to examine which aspects of academic language are acquired.
For this reason, the data is transcribed and analysed according to the conventions of CHILDES programme (MacWhinney, 2000). Furthermore, a specific coding scheme is used to code lexical, morpho-syntactic and textual aspects in order to investigate academic features of the language used in these interactions.
Expected Outcomes
Results show a clear difference between the input of mothers and teachers. While mothers carry out the book reading task in the way they usually do in daily activities, teachers tend to adjust their language use according the composition of the classroom in terms of the number of children learning Dutch as a second language as well as the differences in terms of vocabulary knowledge and language skills in general. In addition, a positive correlation has been established between SES and literacy practices and academic language features.
References
Halliday, M. A. K. (1994). An introduction to functional grammar. London: Edward Arnold. MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES Project: Tools for analysing talk. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Schleppegrell, M.J. (2004), The language of schooling. A functional linguistics perspective, Mahwah/London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
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