Adult Migrants’ Formal and Informal Language Learning Opportunities: Availability, Choice, and Social Integration

Abstract

This study explores adult migrants’ formal and informal opportunities for learning their host country’s dominant language: specifically, the availability, accessibility, and effects of these opportunities on the migrants’ social integration. It prioritizes the migrants’ experience by reporting findings obtained from analyses of questionnaire data collected from 76 migrants in Canada, the United States, and Italy and from interview data collected from a subset of 18 of these migrants. The findings are supplemented by analyses of questionnaire data collected from 12 service providers at the same research sites. The findings show that across the three sites, adult migrants value both formal and informal learning opportunities; that in both learning contexts they prioritize the development of communicative competence, particularly speaking and listening skills; and that outside the classroom they prefer to interact with locals who do not share their home language, and find these interactions very useful in their social integration efforts. However, the findings also reveal that the migrants are not always able to choose freely to engage in the kinds of language learning opportunities that would help them meet their language learning or social integration goals because these opportunities may be unavailable, inaccessible, or insufficiently designed to meet their needs.