The multiple resources of refugee students: a language portrait inquiry

Abstract

ABSTRACT Children and youth from refugee backgrounds have complex language experiences owing to their journeys away from their homelands often taking them through multiple contexts. This study was motivated by a desire to better understand the language resources of students newly arrived as refugees in Australia and their embodied and contextualised experiences of their languages. Language portraits are a tool used to generate insights into language experiences. For this study, the language portrait tool was extended beyond the body to include contexts within which languages are experienced (school, home, the digital domain, other). Participants were 41 secondary students, who arrived as refugees from South Asia and the Middle East and were either enrolled in, or recent graduates of, an intensive English language programme. Findings were derived from (1) coding of languages according to embodied experience and context and (2) thematic analysis of students’ transcribed discussion. Patterns across the cohort indicated that these students primarily experience their thinking as monolingual in their L1. However, the coding of sensory zones indicates that multilingualism is experienced as a multisensory flow of viewing, listening, speaking, eating and otherwise experiencing. Challenging assumptions of the home language environments of refugee students, homes appeared as multilingual domains.