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More on the Project
The project aims and objectives
The Welcoming Languages project aims to: include Arabic as a refugee language in Scottish education to enact integration as a two-way process; provide proof of concept for language diversification in education. It pursues these aims starting from education as a context of integration and through the following objectives: (i) adapt the OAfP to the needs of Scottish educators; (ii) teach Arabic online to 12 educators in Scotland; (iii) introduce Arabic in the Scottish educational context; and (iv) draft policy guidelines on the potential of, and approaches to, the introduction of a refugee language in Scottish education.
The project’s rationale
Why Arabic?
The project focuses on Arabic as one of the main languages spoken by newly arrived asylum seekers and/or refugees (the New Scots) and as the language for which we already designed and developed a beginners’ course that can be tailored to the needs of Scottish educators and Arabic speaking New Scots. The course was a collaborative project between the School of Education (University of Glasgow) and the Arabic Center (Islamic University of Gaza, Palestine) which was completed in 2018. Since then, the course has been successfully taught online to many learners worldwide.
Why education?
We believe that teaching Scottish educators the languages of the New Scots can have several benefits for New Scots but also for the whole school community: it can allow education staff to meet and greet children and families in their own languages and to learn sentences that will be useful to them for immediate communication needs; it can help teachers to expand their language repertoire and to add language tasters to their everyday classroom routine; it can show children that adults in their school are interested in the languages they bring and want to learn them; it can offer a very practical example to all children, regardless of their linguistic background, that languages are worthy of interest and of being learnt; it can help Scottish education staff reflect on the challenges of learning a new language and to empathise with the experiences of children and parents/carers who are learning English.
The project steps
The UofG team asked staff in partner schools as well as Arabic speaking parents/carers and children what language they thought we needed to prioritise for the course (i.e. which needs/situations are more important in this specific context)
We identified three main themes from the needs analysis:- Language for hospitality
- Language for wellbeing
- Language for school
The IUG team developed a beginner Arabic course tailored specifically to the needs that emerged from the language needs analysis (see previous step). They used as a template for the activities the structure of the course developed during the OPAC project.
Staff in the participating schools took a 20 hour beginners Arabic language course tailored to the needs they and the Arabic speaking families identified These were 10 online one-to-one/pair lessons (90min + 30min preparation/practice each) with a teacher based at the Arabic Center of the Islamic University of Gaza (Palestine).
Throughout the lifetime of the project we collected information from teachers, children, Arabic course designers/language teachers to assess the way in which the project was evolving and the extent to which it managed to achieve its aims. Below are three quotes from the final interviews with Scottish primary staff which exemplify some very common responses by educators:
“When we were preparing for our solo talk, I’m not kidding, I had every child right here, and at the end there was this massive applause like ‘Miss, well done, you’ve learnt that language, that’s fabulous’. I asked the children ‘Why do you think Miss [name] is learning Arabic?’ So there’s this [inaudible] ‘because you do Spanish and you do French’ ‘Yes, and what else?’ ‘To help the boys and girls who can’t speak English yet’. So they are beginning to recognise that the reason the teacher is learning Arabic is also to help other children” (Class teacher)
“We get quite a lot of new arrivals that don’t have any English, and their parents don’t have any English. So having the chance to have a few words to speak to them is obviously great. And I think again it’s not a sense of ‘Well, I can speak Arabic fluently’, cause 100% I can’t, but it’s… it’s more just kind of building a bond with parents, to know that actually we’re making an effort. They’re making an effort to learn English, but also we’re making the same effort to make them feel part of the school community, so yeah that’s good. Really helpful” (Head-teacher)
“It’s been really nice in that sense just to have a little bit of commonality and and also it’s allowed me to kind of build an awareness of how difficult it must be for these children who come to Scotland and don’t have English. And actually when… when the shoe’s on the other foot and you’re learning a new language that you know nothing about, it’s really, really difficult” (EAL teacher)
At the end of the project we drafted a report to illustrate the findings of the project and make recommendations based on evidence from the project’s evaluation. The project’s findings were discussed at a celebration event held at the University of Glasgow on 13th December 2022. We also presented the project at an information event at the Scottish Parliament, hosted by Kaukab Stewart (MSP for Glasgow Kelvin) . You can find the Project Report in the ‘Resources‘ tab. We have also drafted separate reports for Children (available in English and Arabic) and for the parents/carers (available English and Arabic). All this material is available on our website.