Language socialisation and second language acquisition in kindergarten.

Little Pitchers, Big Ears? The Success of Learning New Vocabulary through Addressed and Overheard Speech in Flemish- and Moroccan-heritage Preschool Children

Language acquisition research has long focused nearly exclusively on the way in which young children learn language in direct interactions (Akhtar, Jipson, & Callanan, 2001).  However, children also learn much language in indirect situations: by keenly observing others and overhearing conversations.  This dissertation aims to provide more insight into the way in which older (six-year-old) children learn language in both direct and indirect contexts.  We conducted two studies in children in the final year of kindergarten. 

The first study was conducted in Flemish-heritage children (N = 53) in ten different kindergartens in Antwerp.  The children were exposed to a story with twelve novel words in three different interaction situations.  The study revealed that six-year-old children learned equally well in direct interaction with an adult experimenter, who introduced herself as a ‘new teacher’ at school, as through overhearing conversations among two adults.  The children learned, however, significantly fewer novel words when they had the opportunity to overhear classroom interactions.  The fact that children learn equally well in direct interaction as through overhearing conversations among adults is in line with previous research in infants from European background.

Several hypotheses have been proposed to explain why children learn less through overhearing classroom interactions.  One explanation is that children are susceptible to effects of classroom socialization.  Classroom socialization means that children, by repeatedly participating in the same classroom activities, gradually know how to behave to be considered as competent members of the classroom community (Mehan, 1979).  The school system implies, amongst others, that children are generally not expected to learn from other activities simultaneously occurring in the classroom.  Therefore, the children may have been less attentive to the conversations that were intended for their peers, and they learned fewer words in this condition.  Another explanation is that children may find it more interesting to overhear conversations that are intended for an adult, than conversations meant for their peers.  In order to verify this hypothesis, the experiment should be replicated in a context that is less schoolish (such as a birthday party).

The second study was conducted in Flemish-heritage (N = 53) and Moroccan-heritage (N = 79) children in fourteen kindergartens in Antwerp.  The children were exposed to the story in the same interaction situations as in the first study.  The results showed that Flemish-and Moroccan-heritage children learned equally well through addressed speech.  In the overhearing of classroom interactions Moroccan-heritage children learned fewer new words than Flemish-heritage children, but the difference was not significant.  The largest and most remarkable difference appeared in the overhearing of conversations among adults: Moroccan-heritage children learned significantly fewer words than Flemish-heritage children in this condition.

It is remarkable that Moroccan-heritage children had lower word acquisition results than Flemish-heritage children in the indirect interaction situation among adults, since ethnographic research has shown that Moroccan-heritage children may be more used to learn through observation than children from a Western-European background (Pels & de Haan, 2004).  Therefore, we had expected that Moroccan-heritage children might be better in learning language through indirect interaction situations, or that they might be at least equally good at it as Flemish-heritage children. 

We considered different explanations for the word acquisition differences between children from both cultural backgrounds in the indirect interaction situation among adults.  In our view, the most plausible explanation is related to processes of social identification.  Similar to the most prototypical educational situation all experiments were conducted by a (female) experimenter of Flemish origin.  The addressed adult was also of Flemish origin.  We suspect that Flemish-heritage children, by sharing the same ethnic background as the storytellers, were better able to socially identify with them.  Therefore, they may have been more inclined to overhear their conversations and they learned more novel words than Morooccan-heritage children.   

A quantitative analysis of children’s attention management indicates that Flemish-heritage children demonstrated indeed significantly more sustained attention for the storytelling event than Moroccan-heritage children.  This was the case for both the exposure to classroom interaction as in the overhearing of two adults.  The research finding that Moroccan-heritage children show less sustained attention to the conversations around them in a (Flemish) educational context is especially important.  Language acquisition works cumulatively: children who attend to both indirect and direct interaction situations and learn language from that, make potentially more progress with respect to language learning than children who exclusively attend when they are involved in direct interactions.  It has been frequently demonstrated in previous research that Moroccan- (and Turkish-) heritage children experience more language learning difficulties at school than Flemish-heritage children and children from other ethnic backgrounds (see, amongst others, OECD, 2010; Verhaeghe & Van Damme, 2007).  The fact that Moroccan-heritage children make fewer use of overhearing opportunities, might thus partly provide an explanation why they make less progress with respect to language acquisition.