Martine van der Pluijm

170 Chapter 6 To establish effects on children’s oral language development, it might be helpful to use different tests. Specific tests that have proven to be successful for obtaining insight in young children’s language development include narrative tasks (e.g., Reese, 2010), curriculum-related vocabulary tasks (Teepe, 2018) adapted to each age group (preschool, kindergarten, grades 1 and 2), language production tests (e.g., number of words used), or structured teacher ratings of child language development (Sheridan et al., 2011). Testing children’s phonemic awareness and their skills to identify and manipulate phonemes in spoken words would be useful. Phonemic awareness is an important predictor of child literacy development (Sénéchal & LeFevre, 2002) and can be stimulated during the language activities in the AHL program. Additionally, researchers can consider the use of standardized language tests (e.g., productive vocabulary, receptive vocabulary). For bilingual children, these tests should be conducted in both the minority and majority language, acknowledging children’s potential that might be less visible when testing only the majority language (Blom, 2019; Van Tuijl et al., 2001). Extending AHL to the home environment One more limitation of this thesis is that the AHL program activities were only conducted in classrooms and not at home. The reason to choose for this school-based approach was the feasibility for teachers. The AHL program is designed to facilitate connections (i.e., partnerships) between the home and school environment in support of children’s language development. Parent-child activities are arranged in classrooms to encourage parent-child interactions, stimulating the transfer to the home environment. Although many teachers had positive experiences with occasional home visits, they were unable to systematically conduct home visits during this research. We never pushed teachers to make home visits. We inspired them to investigate how they could involve the home environment in the classroom (e.g., assessing the HLE, arranging parent-child activities connected to the home environment) and showed the impact of these actions. Our findings showed increased parent-child interactions in classrooms and parent ratings of the number of home language activities at posttest compared to pretest. However, no significant improvement was found in teachers’insight into the HLE. Some teachers wondered how they could gain this insight in the HLE, which they considered important for improving their work with parents (Chapter 4). This finding raises the question whether stronger connections with the home environment is an option for teachers. Given the evidence of the effectiveness of FLPs in home environments (Manz et al., 2010; Van Steensel et al., 2019), future research can investigate how the AHL design principles can be applied in the home environment of lower-educated parents. We have some recommendations for researchers who are considering such investigations. First, the conditions for teachers to conduct home visits should be explored. These conditions will differ in and between countries, cities, and schools. Therefore, a tailored approach to these