Konstantina Olioumtsevits

The aim of the present study is to investigate vocabulary teaching in children with refugee backgrounds. The effectiveness of three vocabulary interventions—flashcards, pantomime, and use of contextual cues—is examined within the context of formal primary education in Greece. The improvement of the children’s vocabulary is also assessed in association with factors related to the students’ background as well as factors related to the words taught. Thirty-three pupils from the second to the sixth primary school grade attended the teaching interventions. Their first languages are Arabic, Farsi, and Kurdish. According to the results, flashcards and pantomime significantly improve children’s second language vocabulary skills, while this finding does not apply to the intervention involving contextual cues. Age is found to play a role only in the latter intervention, while the effectiveness of no intervention was influenced by word category.

This exploratory study aims to investigate the effectiveness of group dictation in primary school children with a refugee background. More specifically, running dictation was employed in the teaching of two grammatical phenomena in L2 Greek, tense and gender agreement. Two studies were conducted to investigate each grammatical structure separately. Each study consisted of a pre-test that investigated the pupils’ performance on the grammatical structure, the teaching intervention via running dictation, and a post-test that explored its efficiency on pupils’ accuracy. All pupils that participated in the studies were enrolled in formal Greek education and their L1s were Arabic, Farsi or Kurdish. According to the results from both studies, the children’s post-intervention performance did not improve significantly. However, the pupils’ accuracy on some of the grammatical forms tested as well as their error patterns indicated that running dictation helped the pupils notice the target grammatical phenomena and thus become more aware of them. Moreover, some data showed that older pupils benefited more from the target-activity than younger ones. Therefore, the present study provides evidence that running dictation may have a positive qualitative rather than quantitative impact on learners’ grammatical development and is dependent on the pupils’ age.