Frederike Groothoff
The advantages of part-time PhD-studies: investigating second language acquisition while being a teacher at an elementary school for second language learners
Frederike Groothoff will talk about her experiences both as a teacher at Taalschool Utrecht and as a researcher and how these two fields merge together. Some of the topics she will touch on include: celebrating home languages, the use of communication strategies, language proficiency development and assessment of second language learners.
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Frederike Groothoff is a third year PhD student at Universiteit Utrecht, as well as a primary school teacher working in a school specifically for newly arrived migrant pupils between the ages of 4-12. This school is situated in Utrecht, in the middle of the Netherlands. The school now has around 300 children from all over the world. The children stay between one and two years at the school before they enter a regular Dutch primary or secondary school.
In 2014 Frederike Groothoff received a special teacher scholarship to do her PhD; since then she has worked two days per week at Taalschool Utrecht. Her PhD project is a longitudinal study into the oral school language development of young newly arrived migrant children. She has followed 50 children (age 4-6) from the year they arrived in the Netherlands, up to two and a half years later. Frederike Groothoff conducted observations in their kindergarten classrooms and collected data on four successive occasions about the receptive vocabulary of these children and their narrative abilities.