Understanding the “Voices” of Children of Immigrant and Refugee Backgrounds

Abstract

AbstractThis paper presents a series of narratives on multilingualism and education based on data collected from five case studies that were conducted throughout the 2017 fall semester of the postgraduate program “Language Education for Refugees and Migrants” (LRM), offered by the Hellenic Open University. Each case study narrates the story of a child with a refugee or migrant background living in Greece. The main aim of the paper is to map the sociolinguistic profiles of the children by combining data collected using semi-structured interviews with the analysis of their identity texts. Both the sociolinguistic profiles and the identity texts “give voice” and articulate the children’s needs and thoughts and are used as a way to shed light to issues of multilingualism in education and to discuss conclusions for language teaching in diverse learning environments. The paper subsequently draws implications about language teaching in inclusive and multilingual learning contexts.