Like language itself, second-language education is frequently evolving, and countries should be prepared to harness innovations to improve outcomes for migrants. By expanding the number of players involved in providing language experiences, governments can expand opportunities for individual migrants to acquire the linguistic tools required to fully participate in the host country’s economy and society – along with possible additional benefits for broader socio‑economic integration, by more closely linking migrants with the host-country society. What is more, by engaging with innovators in the field of education, either in the academic or private sector, policy makers can harness their experience not only to design programmes that have the best learning outcomes for migrants, but also potentially to provide services more efficiently at a lower cost. Non-profit organisations are also uniquely positioned to experiment, and have in particular shown a willingness to increase migrants’ exposure to language through cultural exchange, often benefiting from a robust network of volunteers. Social engagement can both make language more meaningful and increase motivation while also giving migrants the opportunity to practise speaking in an immersive and low-stakes environment.
Language Training for Adult Migrants
8. Engage with education specialists and non-traditional partners to design courses and broaden learning opportunities
WHAT and WHY?
WHO?
Embracing new approaches requires engaging with new actors, namely, those who have been involved in their design, testing and development. Successful programmes are those that involve educators and scholars on language acquisition in the design process. New private‑, public-, and social-sector partners may bring not only innovation and interdisciplinary expertise, but also cost savings to governments. Increasingly, countries have recognised that a multisectoral, “whole of society” approach that involves non-traditional stakeholders can simultaneously boost language and civic integration.
HOW?
Understanding which teaching tools and technologies have the best education outcomes is one way to help policy makers understand which tools will have the best labour market outcomes. Countries can benefit from the experience of partners such as:
Educational institutions and second-language specialists
Private sector actors
Box 8.1. Community College Brings Educational Research Base to its Partnership with Resettlement Agencies in the United States
Arizona’s Refugee Resettlement Program uses Office of Refugee Resettlement Refugee Support Services funding to support the Refugee Education Program (REP) at Pima Community College (PCC) in Tucson, Pima County, Arizona. Prior to reductions in the United States refugee cap beginning in 2017, Pima County received over 1 000 officially designated refugees each year. Those in need of English language and literacy skills are referred to REP by local resettlement agencies. In 2017, REP served 790 migrant students.
All REP instructors are part of a professional learning community and are continuously trained in a number of innovative pedagogical methods. REP also works with the University of Arizona to train volunteers working with students with limited literacy.
REP instructors have developed a research-based placement assessment tool for adult emergent readers. Pre‑testing happens at intake and registration, and post-testing happens at the end of each ten-week session. The teaching methodology is designed to build upon students’ lived experiences and lead to higher-order-thinking skills in English and successful navigation of United State’s systems. Methods include phonemic awareness and phonics, which are taught concurrently using the Language Experience Approach (connecting students’ oral abilities to print by transcribing them). They also include Total Physical Response (using physical movement to react to or describe verbal input). A Whole‑Part-Whole (meaning and context- linguistic parts- return to meaning and context) approach contextualises phonics in meaningful text while still allowing instructors to explore sound-symbol correspondences with their students.
Given a growing number of students who have lived in the United States for more than a year, REP has built new curricula balancing English for New Americans and College and Career Readiness English classes. Because the goal of federal resettlement services is to prepare migrants for employment as soon as possible, a specialised Vocational English Language Training curricula supports industries such as hospitality and manufacturing. REP meets with employers to maintain a current employment-focused curriculum.
PCC provides REP with in-kind services such as building space, facilities maintenance, use of IT and classroom equipment, IT services, books and materials. REP also opened a computer lab where students can receive drop-in help. Standard course activities make use of online and digital literacy resources.
Non-governmental organisations, social partners, and volunteer networks
Substantial work has been conducted in educational institutions that can provide instruction on effective course design. For example, many countries have embraced the lesson of differentiation in the classroom, specifically providing students with the same materials but explaining them in different ways and allowing students to manipulate those materials according to their levels (Tomlinson and Imbeau, 2010). Education specialists have determined that this is more sustainable in smaller classes, and in response, countries such as France have introduced a specific focus on creating smaller classes in their asylum or integration laws (OECD, 2019). When this is impossible, agencies can help teachers by creating more finely differentiated classes, through ability grouping (see Lesson 7). Another way to improve outcomes as class sizes increase is to provide one‑on-one mentorship. Drawing from these lessons, countries such as Australia and Sweden as well as municipalities, such as Wroclaw in Poland,1 have pursued peer matching or volunteer tutor programmes. To be effective, countries should consider the best way to recruit and retain volunteers across regions and programmes, perhaps through a centralised information management system. In the United States, academic partners and adult education researchers, frequently at the community college level, are often engaged directly in provision of language education to migrants (Box 8.1). In France, the Ministry of Interior has, in the context of the “Open the School to Parents for the Success of Children” (OEPRE) programme, expanded its partnership with the Ministry of National Education to better prepare language teachers and develop pedagogical resources. The aim is to further co‑ordinate the OEPRE programme with the national integration plan and to further communication between pedagogical co‑ordinators at the French Office for Immigration and Integration (OFII) and education experts.
Box 8.2. Private Sector Partners Engage in Experimentation in Finland
An innovative tool being explored by Finland is the Social Impact Bond, designed to catalyse private and institutional actors to customise integration services, including language training according to what is needed at the workplace. The EUR 14.2 million fund, piloted in 2016 as Koto-SIB Employment Programme and managed by Epiqus Oy, under the auspices of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment, focuses on mobilising private expertise to move migrants quickly into the labour market. Outcome thresholds and metrics were designed collaboratively. The programme is focused on individual coaching and job matching.
While this programme is intended as a fast-track employment programme, for many of the career paths offered, the Finnish language is an essential component. Beginner, A2, and B1 Finnish groups are offered for the three‑ to four‑month course. Unlike integration training, language teaching deploys a combination of different learning methods based on functional language comprehension and cognitive learning perception. Language courses are vocationally oriented, differentiation is carried out in-class, and internships begin when the migrant is deemed to have attained the requisite level of Finnish. The public sector only pays for the courses if participating migrants find employment.
There are some limitations. Migrants are only eligible for the programme if they can read and write in the Latin alphabet, for example. Only residents who are registered unemployed jobseekers can participate. The 2016 and 2017 cohorts were initially limited to immigrants in need of international protection. Data for the first fully inclusive cohort will not be available until late 2021, meaning a quantitative impact assessment is not expected until at the end of 2022. Still, interim results for August 2019 showed that by that time, 750 migrants from the initial focus group of 2 000 had found employment, at an estimated savings of EUR 20 million for the government. Employment outcomes were significantly higher for those in the training versus the control group.
The European Investment Bank produced a video to describe the programme and its successes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9p8P_gimqpI.
In addition to academic partners, many OECD countries, such as Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, benefit from mobilisation of private sector actors in adult language learning, approving specific course providers as partners in their integration programmes or offering vouchers for migrants to use to pay for a course of their choosing. Denmark has designed financial incentives to encourage service providers to contribute to more efficient and individually oriented tuition (see Lesson 4; Ramboll, 2007b). Fewer countries have fully leveraged the private sector’s capacity for agility and experimentation to design innovative integration programmes, but given the rapidly evolving technology sector and tight government budgets, such partnerships may yield important results. For example, with subsidies from the French Ministry of Culture (DGLFLF), the French language provider, CAVILAM – Alliance Française, developed the application “Français premiers pas,” which is freely available and designed to help refugees and asylum seekers by providing the basics of the French language in a simple, accessible way. CAVILAM, which offers immersion courses at its technologically equipped facility in Vichy, has also positioned itself as a research centre and has developed courses for teachers of French, particularly focused on effective use of online teaching pedagogies. Finland has recently undertaken a pilot project on integration and language‑training through social impact bonds (Box 8.2), where the government pays only when the private sector actor meets employment targets and efficiencies are gained. The programme is designed to provide migrants with the tools they require to move into the labour market as quickly as possible and aims to provide language instruction in a hands-on way.
Box 8.3. Supporting the Development of Theatrical Practices for Language Learning in Portugal
With their ability to experiment, foundations and non-profit organisations can serve as centres for innovation. They can also support and expand programmes that arise organically in response to a perceived need. In Portugal, language teachers of the Portuguese Refugee Council (CPR) founded the amateur theatre group, RefugiActo, in 2004, having identified the need for a forum to allow refugee voices to be heard. The group developed theatrical productions to raise awareness of the need for social inclusion in Portuguese society, but it also noted the potential for improved integration outcomes for migrants. From February 2014 to January 2017, CPR partnered with the PARTIS – Artistic Practices for Social Inclusion – initiative of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon to promote theatre and dramatic bodily expression as strategies facilitating language acquisition of asylum seekers and refugees. Through the project, “Refuge and Theatre: A Thousand Gestures Sleep in My Fingers,” the theatre programme benefited from support designed to ground the project and ensure its durability, as well as from external evaluation of its methodologies. Financial support enabled the non-profit to dedicate staff full-time to development of innovative techniques. Having begun the project at a time when migrant flows to Portugal were relatively low and service provision was decentralised, the CPR/PARTIS programme was well-situated to respond to increased demand and interest from 2015 onward.
One aim of the project was to create a document that could be widely disseminated to groups interested in using theatrical techniques to improve language learning, not only for refugees, but for all migrants in need of social inclusion. The document, a “Notebook of Theatrical Practices for the Learning of the Language” has been published in Portuguese and English. It provides a toolkit for following the methodology of “learning by doing,” mimicry, and improvisation to relieve the stress caused by the real-life situations, such as medical appointments and relations with immigration services, that inspire the lessons (Galvão and Cabrita, 2020). An artist and a teacher of Portuguese as a Foreign language designed the exercises with close attention to the themes of A1/A2 language learning levels.
Finally, it is important to acknowledge that language learning can be enriched by increased exposure to social life in the host language. Integration activities and language learning can be seen as mutually reinforcing. Most OECD countries rely on non-profit organisations that provide conversation groups and “language buddy” mentoring (see Špačková and Štefková, 2006). In Ireland, the Third Age Foundation runs the Fáilte Isteach project, which supports weekly conversation groups involving 1 200 elderly Irish volunteers and 3 200 immigrant learners through 104 branches across the country. In Luxembourg, the Café des Langues promotes language tables and the opportunity to enjoy food with new friends. An artist platform and start-up incubator in Paris, France, the 104,2 provided language learning activities for recently arrived migrants through theatre classes, allowing the interaction and cultural exchange between migrants and long-standing artists (see Box 8.3 for a similar example from Portugal). In several countries, including Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland Italy, and the Netherlands, language buddies have organised exchanges around sport, and in 2016, a European Commission report outlined good practices in designing such programmes for social inclusion (European Commission, 2016). Non-profit organisations may also fill a co‑ordination function in countries with decentralised programmes. The International Rescue Committee (IRC) in the United States has, for example, developed an online information hub called Switchboard that, in addition to connecting migrants with local resources, offers a library of learning resources and e‑courses.3
Some countries have also expressly incorporated community engagement into integration programmes, recognising that non-traditional stakeholders are well positioned to offer language immersion and cultural learning, but that they require resources and co‑ordination to remain viable. Canada’s Settlement Program includes services that focus on building connections and promoting social cohesion. A wide variety of activities support informal language learning for newcomers, such as conversation circles, peer support through recreation activities, community events, and matching opportunities for cross-cultural exchange with Indigenous peoples and broader host communities. Australia has recently prioritised extension of interaction with faith communities. The Portuguese High Commission for Migration expressly promotes Non-formal Educational Actions in recognition of the fact that diverse learners require diverse learning opportunities. In Latvia, the Ministry of Culture has funded an improvisational theatre language club. Several countries have introduced a model of integration activities in which mothers can participate alongside their children, including Austria, Estonia, Germany, Iceland, and Italy. Immigration New Zealand supports the “Welcoming Communities” programme, which – while not expressly dedicated to language learning – brings migrants together with native‑born members of their local communities to build connections for better social and economic participation. Similar initiatives exist in Australia, Canada, and the United States. Such programmes have the added benefit of potentially reducing the number of course hours needed for civic integration programmes by indirectly encouraging social inclusion in the host community.4 DirectGovernment involvement also reduces the potential for dilution of responsibility that that may occur with the addition of multiple stakeholders.
Notes
← 1. The municipality of Wroclaw introduced a volunteer-based “Tongues of the World” programme in recognition of the financial barrier many migrants encountered to accessing language courses. The programme also encourages intercultural communication and community acceptance. See https://www.wnjs.pl/en/about-the‑project/.
← 2. Presentation of the 104: http://www.104.fr/presentation.html.
← 3. Switchboard is funded by the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) and implemented by the IRC. The IRC has also partnered with the Lutheran Immigrant Refugee Service (LIRS) to provide employment-related trainings and technical assistance. For more information, see https://switchboardta.org.
← 4. Various studies have concluded that language is a means to transmit culture. Language is shaped by culture because it is the primary means of communication within a culture. Thus, it is recognised that cultural proficiency can enhance language learning and vice versa. Lafayette, R. C. (1988). Integrating the teaching of culture into the foreign language classroom (in A. J. Singerman (Ed.), Toward a new integration of language and culture (pp. 47‑62). Middlebury, VT: Northeast Conference); Nguyen, T. T. T. (2017). Integrating culture into language teaching and learning: Learner outcomes. The Reading Matrix: An International Online Journal, 17(1), 145‑155.