Educating Refugee-background Students

Critical Issues and Dynamic Contexts

Shawna Shapiro, Raichle Farrelly, Mary Jane Curry, Shawna Shapiro, Raichle Farrelly, Mary Jane Curry

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781783099962
• eBook ISBN: 9781783099993
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Adult Education
• Index: Social Sciences

This collection of empirical work offers an in-depth exploration of key issues in the education of adolescents and adults with refugee backgrounds residing in North America, Australia and Europe. These studies foreground student goals, experiences and voices, and reflect a high degree of awareness of the assets that refugee-background students bring to schools and broader society. Chapters are clustered according to the two themes of Language and Literacy, and Access and Equity. Each chapter includes a discussion of context, researcher positionality and implications for educators, policy-makers and scholars.

Part 1

Language and Literacy

1 Recently Resettled Refugee Students Learning English in US High Schools: The Impact of Students’ Educational Backgrounds

Christopher T. Browder

This chapter reports on a quantitative study that examined the English learning of 146 US high school English learner (EL)1 students with a focus on 35 recently resettled ethnic Chin refugees from Myanmar. The goals were to understand how students’ educational backgrounds influenced their learning of English and to identify the most useful variables for understanding the challenges facing recently resettled refugees and students with limited or interrupted formal education (SLIFE). The study had three main findings: (1) the Chin students learned English much more slowly than other groups; (2) most of the Chin students could be identified as SLIFE, but very few had low first language (L1) literacy; (3) some of the variables used to identify students as SLIFE were associated with slower English learning, but were not very strong or reliable predictors, due to high variability. These findings suggest that there must be other, important reasons why some students learn English more slowly than others, and that students characterized as SLIFE may not have all the same characteristics and needs. This study broadens our understanding of SLIFE and provides insights for school systems considering how to best serve recently resettled refugees.

Introduction

In recent years, there has been a movement to fill a gap in research on second language acquisition that is particularly relevant to refugee-background students (Bigelow & Watson, 2012) – namely, our lack of understanding of how EL students’ educational backgrounds impact their learning of English. A number of researchers have shown that prior schooling, literacy or other educational experiences in students’ first languages influence their learning of English as an additional language in high school settings (e.g. Brown et al., 2006; Klein & Martohardjono, 2015; Thomas & Collier, 2002).

In 2014, I conducted a study to build on this research, examining the relationship between high school EL students’ educational backgrounds before emigrating and their rates of English learning once in the United States. Specifically, I wanted to know whether SLIFE learned English more slowly than other EL students. In the course of this study, I had to determine the best way to categorize students as SLIFE. Based on definitions of SLIFE drawn from the existing literature, I began to look at a group of EL students and identify variables related to their educational backgrounds. As a result of that study, I encountered a group of students whom most people would consider to be SLIFE based on how the data had set them apart: recently resettled ethnic Chin refugees from Myanmar. Most of them had experienced interruptions in their schooling, and on average, they were learning English more slowly than the other EL students in their school system. This study delves further into the trends among the Chin students in my study in order to better understand the impact that refugee-background students’ educational backgrounds have on their English learning.

Literature Review: Recently Resettled Refugee Students and SLIFE

At present, the educational literature has a tendency to conflate recently resettled refugee students and SLIFE. For example, some studies on recently resettled refugees refer to them as students with ‘truncated formal education’ (cf. Gahungu et al., 2011) or ‘limited formal schooling’ (cf. Walsh, 1999), but do not disaggregate the data for those with more previous formal education from those with less. Similarly, some of the educational literature on SLIFE is based on the experiences of teachers working with groups of recently resettled refugees, but it is not clear from this literature whether all of those students actually had documented interrupted education or verified low L1 education and literacy (cf. DeCapua et al., 2010).

Admittedly, most US school systems still do not collect enough information on EL students’ educational backgrounds to systematically or accurately identify students as SLIFE (Advocates for Children of New York, 2010). In fact, one study found that students identified as having ‘interrupted formal education’ by their school system often did not have such interruptions (Klein & Martohardjono, 2006). At present, US school systems generally conduct interviews and collect transcripts during the federally mandated Home Language Survey to determine which newly arrived EL students have experienced interruptions in their education (Zacarian & Haynes, 2012), but very few administer objective tests to determine which have low L1 literacy or limited academic content knowledge, as such tests are only now being developed (Klein & Martohardjono, 2015; Silverstein, 2016; Zehr, 2009).

Given the circumstances of most refugees, it is understandable why researchers might conflate recently resettled refugee students with SLIFE: It is well documented that many refugees have limited access to education in their homeland due to injustice, conflict and physical hardships (Flaitz, 2006; United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund [UNICEF], 2014). We also know that this educational deprivation often continues during forced migration, in intermediary nations and in refugee camps (Dryden-Peterson, 2015).

There are also limits to the literature on immigrant and refugee students who do have documented gaps in their educational backgrounds. Research is still quite limited on how L1 education and literacy influence second language learning (Tarone, 2010; Zehr, 2009). Much of the research that specifically investigates SLIFE generally relies on case studies (cf. Bigelow, 2007), or otherwise small samples (cf. Brown et al., 2006), rather than using quantitative data with larger samples. Some of the studies related to SLIFE do not include sufficient data to determine whether the students in the sample are actually SLIFE (cf. Thomas & Collier, 2002). Finally, some of the research related to SLIFE involves participants with no formal literacy or education (cf. Brucki & Rocha, 2004; Castro-Caldas, 2004), but those participants may be dissimilar to the typical SLIFE in US schools and quite different from most recently resettled refugees, who often have at least some experience with formal schooling (Mace-Matluck et al., 1998).

In both research and educational policy, the criteria used to identify SLIFE vary widely (Advocates for Children of New York, 2010). The New York State Department of Education (2011: 2), for example, expects students to have ‘at least two years less formal schooling than their peers’ in order to be classified as ‘students with interrupted formal education’, while the State of Maryland expects students to have been out of school for only six months to be classified as having ‘interrupted schooling’ (COMAR 13A.05.07, 2016). Other researchers point out that a person can have uninterrupted formal schooling yet be undereducated due to inadequate schooling (DeCapua et al., 2010), which suggests that policymakers should consider students’ content knowledge and academic skills (e.g. math, literacy) instead of just their schooling history. This view is supported by research showing that time spent in school does not correspond as closely with literacy and content learning as one might assume (Browder, 2015; Tarone & Bigelow, 2005).

These lingering concerns with the SLIFE label have an impact on decision-making in US school districts. When a large number of refugees are resettled into an area, the local school system must decide what educational services are appropriate. If a school system’s decision-making is not informed by quality research, students may in some places be denied the support they need, or in other places, forced into inappropriate support programs (Feinberg, 2000), which has even led to civil rights lawsuits (cf. Issa v. the School District of Lancaster, 2016).

This study aims therefore to broaden our understandings of SLIFE and provide insights for school systems considering how to best serve recently resettled refugees. It focuses on the following questions:

(1) To what extent does limited or interrupted formal education affect the rate of English learning for EL students – particularly those with refugee backgrounds?

(2) What independent variables are most useful for understanding the challenges that SLIFE have with learning English in formal educational settings?

Chin refugees

The recently resettled refugees in this study were ethnic Chin from Myanmar (formerly known as Burma). For some time now, Myanmar has been one of the leading countries of origin for refugees accepted into the United States (Martin & Yankay, 2014). In 2014, about 23% of all refugees admitted into the United States originated from Myanmar. About a third of those were from the Chin ethnic group (Burmese American Community Institute, 2015). The Chin have been fleeing religious and ethnic discrimination from the military in Myanmar for many decades (Human Rights Watch, 2009). Because the neighboring countries of India, Malaysia and Thailand are not parties to the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees (United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees, 2010), Chin refugees fleeing Myanmar have to wander in search of a safe place to live while applying for asylum elsewhere and often wind up involuntarily placed in jails, detention centers and refugee camps. Chin refugees often spend many years or even decades living without stability or security in Malaysia, Indonesia and/or Thailand before eventually coming to the United States (Burma Link, 2015).

Over 40% of the Chin refugees accepted into the United States have been of school age (Martin & Yankay, 2014), but often they were unable to attend school consistently prior to resettlement. In Myanmar, less than 60% of the general population has attended secondary school, and only 9% has received any preschool education (UNICEF, 2014). When Chin youth leave Myanmar, they usually spend many years in refugee camps where they receive little if any formal schooling before emigrating to their new home (World Relief, 2015). In Malaysia, for instance, only 41% of the children in refugee camps attend primary school, and fewer than 2% attend secondary school (Dryden-Peterson, 2015). To make matters worse, Chin are generally not allowed to attend local schools when outside of the camps. For all these reasons, school-age Chin refugees are likely to arrive in the United States with limited or interrupted formal education. Therefore, one could assume that recently resettled Chin refugees fit into the SLIFE category and would have the same disadvantages when learning English in US schools.

The Setting for this Study

The county school system for this study is located in central Maryland, near Washington, DC. Although it is one of the nation’s most affluent and educated counties, it is also one of its most diverse and well integrated in terms of race, socioeconomic status and ethnicity (US Census Bureau, 2016). Although it is more suburban than urban, it is an immigrant gateway community with very large populations of first-generation Korean and Latin American immigrants. A few years ago, it also rather suddenly became home to about 1,500 recently resettled ethnic Chin refugee-background persons from Myanmar (Lee, 2012).

The participating school system has a reputation for excellence (US News and World Report, 2013). The EL students in this study were as well supported, if not better supported, than other EL students typically in US high schools (cf. Gandara et al., 2003). In this district, high school EL students arriving with very low or no English were placed in a special program, called a newcomer program, for a year or more. After about a year, they transferred to their neighborhood schools where their schedules included some classes from a program of English for speakers of other languages (ESOL).2

Methodology

To answer the above research questions, I undertook the following methods:

Sampling and data collection

In 2012, with the permission of the school district and the help of its teachers in the ESOL program, I recruited high school EL students to participate in the original study. All 12 of the county high schools with EL students agreed to participate in the study. The ESOL program teachers in those schools met with students to obtain informed consent from them and their legal guardians. In total, 199 of the 352 high school EL students in the county assented with their parents’ consent to participate in the study. Admittedly, student...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part 1: Language and Literacy
• Part 2: Access and Equity
• Index