Abstract
Mastery of literacy skills in the language(s) of the host country is considered a key element for the successful integration of immigrants. The current paper focuses on possibly one of the most challenging aspects of the issues of linguistic integration of immigrants, i.e., literacy acquisition by “low-literate” adult immigrants in a “multilingual” environment such as Luxembourg. It documents Luxembourg’s current state of literacy education policies and practices with regard to low-literate adult L2 learners. Also, it contains a participatory observation on a French literacy course in Luxembourg in order to look into the actual implementation and effectiveness of such courses in more detail. In doing so, we look into the relevant policies and practices of two other multilingual countries, i.e., Canada and Belgium, in order to situate the present practices of Luxembourg within larger contexts and provide insights into how to promote better policy and education options for low-literate adult immigrants in Luxembourg.
Highlights
Importance of linguistic integration in the context of migration International migration has become a common practice world-wide, and the issues of integration and adaptation of foreigners have emerged as being crucial for the immigrants themselves and for the maintenance of the host society
Mastery of literacy is important for the receiving society as well, as dubbed “adult literacy is crucial to the economic performance of industrialized nations” and “inadequate levels of literacy among a broad section of the population potentially threaten the strength of economies and the social cohesion of nations” (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development 1995:13)
The authors of this paper observed and participated in seven sessions of its two-hour classes, in order to understand the actual implementation of adult literacy training in Luxembourg, including the profile of the course participants, the organization of the classes, teaching methods and material, and problematic areas for learning
Summary
This section reports our participatory research on a French literacy course for adults in Luxembourg. The authors of this paper observed and participated in seven sessions of its two-hour classes, in order to understand the actual implementation of adult literacy training in Luxembourg, including the profile of the course participants, the organization of the classes, teaching methods and material, and problematic areas for learning. While observing the literacy classroom, we applied a few linguistic interventions to the learners in order to assess their literacy skills and processes. A rough assessment of their oral and literacy skills in French was made in the course of our class observations and interventions, because there was no such assessment provided by the teacher.
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