Speeding up Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition of Minority Children

Abstract

The importance of lexical skills in language development and school achievement is widely recognised. Migrant children in the Netherlands lag far behind their Dutch classmates with respect to vocabulary in Dutch. To speed up the acquisition of vocabulary by migrant children in the first four grades of primary school an experimental programme was designed. This article presents the results of the evaluation of this programme. In a longitudinal experiment which tracked both an experimental and a comparison group (n = 57, resp. 53), both groups of children were pre-tested and post-tested each year with curriculum-dependent and-independent lexical tests. In addition, their vocabulary and text reading abilities were tested in 5th and 7th grade to examine whether the programme had broader and long-term effects. The outcomes suggest that it is possible to increase the rate at which minority children acquire second language vocabulary. In each grade, the children in the experimental group outperformed those in the comparison group. By the end of the 4th grade, the experimental group children were one or two years ahead of their comparison group age peers in Dutch vocabulary, and they were able to maintain their position in 7th grade. However, they did not attain the level of their Dutch classmates, and were in fact lagging one year behind.