The ‘LEARNS’ project in Ireland: Language Enrichment for ARabic-speaking adolesceNts in Schools

• In Event: Diverse Perspectives on Language Education in the Middle East and Beyond

Proposal

The findings from the Study of Adolescent Lives after Migration (SALaM) Ireland study, as with the larger Study of Adolescent Lives after Migration from America (SALaMA), have shown that poor language proficiency is the most significant challenge for newcomer students from the MENA region, hindering learning in the classroom and delaying integration in both school and the wider community, with potentially negative impacts on overall psychological wellbeing. For example, student participants in our study, reported frustration with the limited language supports available in Ireland, and were often unable to access the curriculum due to their poor level of English. Moreover, stakeholders (including teachers and English as an Additional Language (EAL) support teachers) indicated that a considerable proportion of refugees resettled from the MENA region have only basic or no Arabic literacy, most likely due to missed years of schooling prior to arrival in Ireland.

All these issues are likely to cause further delays in both the host language acquisition and home language maintenance, suggesting that more effective methods are required to better support the educational outcomes and integration of these vulnerable young people. Overall, our findings highlight an urgent need to expand the provision of EAL supports in schools and to develop more creative and effective responses to language teaching that recognize, and include, the specific language and educational needs of Arabic-speaking young people from conflict-affected countries. In fact, students identified language support came up as a crucial way schools can support school in every FGD (the only thing to come up in every single group) and it was ranked as the second most important support, on average, across groups in the SALAMA sites (Stark et al., 2021). As such, language supports should be expanded, and accelerated programs of learning offered to students with minimal English (Gillespie et al, 2022). Additionally, home language preservation should not be forgotten as other literature showcases the importance of mother tongue language in learning a second or new language (www.salzburgglobal.org/multi-year-series/education/pageId/8543). As such QFI set about designing and implementing an innovative and collaborative summer language enrichment program as a first step in helping to address the language difficulties. The delivery of this pilot program was a useful and important opportunity to explore its potential value and benefits and to identify the key elements needed to best support refugee students’ language development and see the transformational power of education in action.

Key features of this program included:
• Was designed as an important first step in helping to improve, through intensive teaching, both the English and Arabic language skills of newcomer students from the MENA region.
• A unique dual language focus which means that English language support will be delivered in the morning while the students will receive Arabic language instruction in the afternoon.
• This program is done with strong school-based support, fostering a sense of belonging which is important to student mental health. This includes a strong collaborative and engaged element/ethos involving QFI, the SALaM Ireland research team and, importantly, senior staff at the school who agreed to facilitate program delivery by providing a dedicated classrooms for the program and by recruiting the existing EAL teacher, who is known to the students, to teach the morning session.
• Involves two Arabic teachers as well, both Syrian (one of whom is Irish, resides in Ireland, and who was identified by the SALaM Ireland team; and one from Los Angeles, CA who has worked on QFI programs for many years), who have been deliberatively recruited to teach and mentor the students in the afternoon session. All teachers have extensive teaching experience.
• The teachers and staff involved are either known to the students or have a cultural connection to the students’ heritage.

This presentation will present an overview of research findings and how they informed the development of two week summer enrichment program and then discuss key findings which demonstrated why this was a successful pilot endeavor for students at this public school in the outskirts of Dublin.

Author

• Carine Allaf, Qatar Foundation International