Abstract
Since the school year 2021-2022 school, all 5-year-old preschoolers in mainstream primary schools have to be screened annually to evaluate their academic listening skills in Dutch by means of the KOALA screening instrument. The screening helps school teams to identify preschoolers who need extra language support in order to safeguard their chances of being successful at school during the first years of primary education. The aim of this governmental policy measure is for schools to actively follow up the results of the screening with a sustainable, effective language integration program.
There is little empirical evidence on how school teams carry out and follow up the screening. In this project, we aim to fill this gap through a mix of quantitative and qualitative research methods, more specifically through a combination of (a) a case-oriented in-depth analysis in a purposive selection of schools that are known to experts as successful providers of language integration programmes, (b) survey research in a representative sample of Flemish primary schools, and (c) broad exploratory observation research in schools that are identified through latent class analysis based on this survey research. The survey study will be linked to the Flemish component of the IELS survey of 2025.
The survey research investigates (1) the way schools organise and experience the KOALA screening, (2) the way in which the results of the KOALA screening result in joint deliberation and the design of concrete language trajectories, (3) the extent to which school team members feel competent to actively contribute to the implementation of the language trajectories, and (4) the needs for support they experience in this respect. The data collected are described in a report in which we also distinguish school types based on latent class analysis.
These results are further explored through two waves of case-based in-depth analysis. The first wave of data collection runs for 14 months and allows us to conduct in-depth analysis not only of the actual approaches to language pathways in successful schools, but also of their impact on selected focus pupils. In a second wave, which is based on the survey results, we select schools that complement the analyses of wave 1. We distinguish two subgroups: on the one hand, schools that also seem to excel but that implement other practices or show a different profile (e.g. in terms of pupil composition) than schools from wave 1, and on the other hand, schools that report that in implementing the KOALA and/or shaping the language integration trajectories, they face many doubts or fail to be successful. For the latter group, we will identify which obstacles hinder the design and implementation of language integration trajectories and which support can help them overcome these obstacles.
This study will lead to far-reaching insights into how primary schools in Flanders actually react to the governmental policy measure regarding the KOALA screening, and will provide schools and education support staff with concrete recommendations to design language integration trajectories more effectively.
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