Teaching Refugee and Immigrant Adults

Abstract

This chapter concerns adult migrants to a new country who are learning the language and literacy of the country and have limited education and literacy in their heritage language. After describing this learner population, the authors discuss trends in language education in different countries, as programs and practitioners have sought to serve them, which include a shift toward respecting and developing their heritage language. The authors describe a set of professional development modules designed to help practitioners work with this learner population, focusing on one of the modules, Bilingualism. This addresses the languages that learners speak when they come to the new countries, how practitioners can facilitate development of these languages, and the resources they need to do this. The chapter concludes with a description of an online hub with links to resources in learners' languages, which is available to educators, materials developers, learners, parents of children, and others.