Refugee and their needs

<b>Forum for teachers working with refugees </b>

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jo
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Joined: Thu Jan 23, 2003 6:34 am

Refugee and their needs

Post by jo » Thu Jan 23, 2003 6:41 am

How can academic esl techniques be modified to meet the special needs of refugees.what are the linguistic and social characteristics of refugees.
I would be be happy to recieve any feedback. I am thinking about doing some voluntry work here in the Uk with refugees.
jo

dduck
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Joined: Thu Jan 16, 2003 11:11 pm
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Refugee and their needs

Post by dduck » Thu Jan 23, 2003 11:22 am

I am thinking about doing some voluntry work here in the Uk with refugees.
I wish you luck with that. The little I know is that this type of job is the best paid esl job in the UK. I'm guessing because it's rather dangerous, and a fair bit depressing.

Iain

Celeste
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Location: *beep* City, Japan

Post by Celeste » Fri Jan 24, 2003 7:36 am

I taught a few refugee students at the ESL school I worked for in Vancouver, Canada. They had plenty of problems, and English was often very difficult for them to learn. As far as curriculum goes, they are most likely to need daily living English. Shopping, post office, telephone, banking, talking to children's teachers, job applications and interviews, are a few areas that the ESL teacher can help them with. In my experience, a lot of my refugee students would have poor attendance because they were busy dealing with so many other things at the same time. A very big difficulty was the low first language education level of some of my refugee students. They were fairly unused to the academic setting, and some were even of low literacy levels in their native language.

noonlite
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Post by noonlite » Wed Mar 12, 2003 11:09 pm

Hello Jo:

I've been working with refugees in the USA for the last five years or so and may have some useful information. It's hard to come up with an idea of the characteristics and linguistic needs of refugees in general, but I have certainly noticed certain characteristice and needs common to particular groups from particular backgrounds. Refugees from Russia, for instance, tend to be highly educated, favor grammatical practice and training, and don't like games (in general) whereas many of my Somalian refugees have had little or no experience with any kind of school at all and are not literate in their own language.

That said, however, the majority of these students have been away from schools for a long time or have had little or no exposure to school environments. One obvious result of this is that they don't comprehend what i at first thought to be simple exercises of matching and fill in the blank. These kinds of exercises often require so much energy to explain how to do that they loose their educative value. Oral practice and demonstration has been the key to success and results. That combined with a great deal of repetition and recycling. Also a thematic curriculum is a good idea. There's much much more to be said, but I gotta go. Help this is helpful.

DD
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Joined: Mon Mar 13, 2006 2:44 am

Post by DD » Tue Mar 21, 2006 11:22 pm

The Adult Migrant Education Service (AMES) has great publications and resources for basic literacy, numeracy and life skills ... their publications catalogue is available to download on their website - www.ames.edu.au - ... This is Australian but surely there's something similar in the UK.

A couple of other websites I find useful are:

The Victorian Department of Education curriculum site:

www.sofweb.vic.edu.au/lem/esl/ecurri.htm#snew

and The New Zealand Ministry for Education ESL website, 'TKI ESL Online':

www.tki.org.nz/r/esol/esolonline/

(I hope those links work!) The sites are from this hemisphere but have useful information about refugee experiences and needs in general.

Good luck!

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