Language Education and Learners of a Refugee Background

This book offers a comprehensive and global perspective on language education for learners of a refugee background. It identifies structural and individual challenges refugees face when learning a new language in a variety of sociolinguistic contexts. At the same time, it offers innovative proposals to empower these learners and address the shortcomings of host environments. Readers will gain insight into innovations and interventions within the various dimensions that characterize sustainable and culturally responsive language education for refugees across educational levels from primary to higher and community education. Topics of interest include experiences of researching language education with learners of a refugee background, collaborating with multiple stakeholders, and designing as well as implementing pedagogies that reflect the latest theories of language teaching and learning in multicultural settings, such as translanguaging and plurilingualism. This book is useful to researchers, teachers, and post-graduate students in language education and applied linguistics, as well as policy-makers and community organizations.

Vander Tavares is Associate Professor of Education at the University of Inland Norway and holds a PhD from York University, Canada. His research interests include teacher education, critical second language education, and internationalization of higher education. In 2021, he was the recipient of the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Award by the Canadian Bureau for International Education (CBIE). He has taught graduate and undergraduate courses in colleges and universities in Canada, Norway and Japan.

Sílvia Melo-Pfeifer is Full Professor of Foreign Language Teacher Education at the University of Hamburg, Germany. She carries out research on pluralistic approaches to language learning and teaching (with particular emphasis on intercomprehension across languages of the same linguistic family), heritage language education, and foreign language teacher education. Methodologically, she has been exploiting the potential of arts-based approaches in raising awareness of what it means to be and become plurilingual.