Resources for Teaching Refugee and Migrant Learners

1. The policy context

• Emergency Language Policy in Greece: Notes From a Decade of Crisis (2025). Useful when you want to understand how Greek schools responded to the arrival of refugee children after 2015: reception classes that widened access but kept learners apart, and teachers who improvised without guidance. A review of 165 studies found no needs analysis, monitoring or evaluation, and a complexity perspective helps explain why so little changed.
• International Mother Language Day 2019 (2019). Useful when someone claims that Greece was monolingual before refugees arrived. The post lists the languages spoken in Greece besides Greek, explains linguistic imperialism and linguicide, and shows a 1989 circular ordering schools to withdraw maps that showed linguistic diversity.
• Every Language Is Someone’s World (2026). Useful when you need the ideas behind the policy debates: first languages, languages and dialects, the difference between a second and a foreign language (Greek for newly arrived refugees is not the same as French as a school subject), plurilingual repertoires, and the three dimensions of language policy.
• Language Diversity in Greece (2021). Useful when you are looking for research on minority language education in Greece. This book review summarises an 18-chapter volume on learners with a refugee or migrant background, the Muslim minority in Thrace, Roma communities and the Greek diaspora.
• Rethinking language textbooks: Language, Ideology, and Liquid Racism (2025). Useful when the textbooks you teach from address every reader as a monolingual speaker of Greek. The post draws on a study of Modern Greek textbooks by Spyros Moustakas, a graduate of the LRM programme, and suggests ways of working critically with such materials.

2. Understanding learners

• Working with refugee-background learners (2018). Useful when you want an overview of research on refugee-background learners before reading further. These are notes on six chapters of Educating Refugee-background Students (Shapiro, Farrelly and Curry), on interrupted schooling, writing, learners’ own goals, citizenship tests and trauma. The post also explains why ‘refugee-background’ is a better term than ‘refugee’.
• Language education for refugees and migrants: An intentional dynamics perspective (2023). Useful when you want to see how experienced teachers perceive the challenges of this work (often differently from the literature), and how one immigrant woman rebuilt her life in Greece. The post presents two MA dissertations, both downloadable; one includes a questionnaire that can be adapted for similar studies.
• New in EJELR: Motivation, Migration, and the Ecology of Language Learning (2026). Useful when you want to understand what sustains and what constrains refugee and migrant learners’ motivation, from residence permits and forced relocations to standardised exams. Based on interviews with six teachers in Greece, the study also argues that teachers’ deficit views of learners are part of the problem.

3. In the classroom

• Inclusion beyond translation: A conversation with Maria Cioé-Peña (2026). Useful when some of your learners share no language with you or with each other. Drawing on a ReaLiTea podcast, the post discusses culturally sustaining pedagogy, drawing on students, families and technology, and multimodal meaning-making through Universal Design for Learning. It is candid about what the conversation leaves unresolved.
• Schoolscapes Aren’t Neutral: Language Teaching for Inclusion (2025). Useful when you want practical activities that make learners’ languages visible in school: language awareness walks, comparative tasks, redesigning signs, and schoolscape audits. The examples come from teachers in the LRM programme, and there is a slide set you can download.
• Using Linguistic Landscapes to Challenge Monolingual Norms in ELT (2025). Useful when your school expects English-only lessons, and you want ideas for making learners’ other languages visible, drawing on a study of multilingual schoolscapes by Brigitta Schvarcz and Amber Warren.
• No child is unwelcome here: ELT tutoring for refugee children (2015). Useful when you are thinking of setting up a tutoring scheme. The post announces an English tutoring programme for refugee children, run by the University of Graz with Caritas, in which trainee teachers first took a course on prejudice-conscious education.
• Critical Skills for Life and Work (2018). Useful when you work with adults, especially professionals, who are looking for work. The post describes an Erasmus+ toolkit for highly skilled refugees, organised around five stages of finding and starting a job, and a plurilingual approach that treats learners’ languages as capital rather than deficit.

Challenging Boundaries in Language Education is an edited volume that I put together, which was published by Springer in 2019. It brings together 15 chapters by 22 scholars who work in applied linguistics, teacher education and related fields, and it asks how the boundaries of language teaching and learning have been drawn, and how they might be crossed.

Three of its chapters look at how migration and the growing diversity of classrooms are changing language education: in superdiverse schools in Vienna and Brno, in the professional identities of language teachers, and in the design of the Language Education for Refugees and Migrants programme at the Hellenic Open University.

4. Teachers and teacher education

• MA in Language Education for Refugees and Migrants (2020). Useful when you are considering postgraduate study in this area. The post outlines the online programme at the Hellenic Open University, its emphasis on translanguaging and critical pedagogy, its modules, placement and dissertation, and its admission requirements.
• Making a difference: The LRM teacher placement (2023). Useful when you are about to teach refugee or migrant learners for the first time. The post describes how the placement is structured (plan, act, reflect), why teachers under pressure fall back on grammar drills, and how they regain the confidence to experiment, with reflections from participants.
• A classroom observation framework (2020). Useful when you are about to observe a class and need to decide what to look for: the context, the learners’ strengths and needs, and the methodological choices behind the lesson, with focusing questions for each and a critical pedagogy dimension.
• Classroom Observation for language teachers: A how-to guide (2023). Useful when you are planning observation visits, from the first meeting with the school to note-taking, debriefing the teacher and reflecting afterwards. It comes with downloadable planning and note-taking templates.
• Research Engagement Among Language Teachers for Refugees and Migrants in Greece (2026). Useful when you want to know why teachers in this field rarely engage with or in research, even when they value it. A survey of 48 teachers identified three profiles (teachers in precarity, epistemologically constrained teachers and agency-suppressed teachers), each needing a different kind of support.
• Disrupting Geographical Borders in Language Education (2018). Useful when you want to see how migration and diversity are reshaping the language teaching profession. The post summarises the three chapters of Challenging Boundaries in Language Education described above.
• Liberating Language Education (2022). Useful when you are deciding whether to read the edited volume by Lytra, Ros i Solé, Anderson and Macleroy, and want a chapter-by-chapter summary and a reviewer’s verdict first.