Georgiou, Alexandra; (2020) Examining the linguistic and multicultural practices of refugee children in a primary school in Cyprus: A sociocultural approach to language learning. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

As a result of the 2015 refugee crisis, classrooms in the Republic of Cyprus are now becoming more linguistically and culturally diverse. Cyprus, as one of the neighbouring host countries, should be working on developing the appropriate conditions for the educational support of children with refugee trajectories. Following a sociocultural approach to second language learning, this ethnographic study is the first to provide empirical evidence of the linguistic and multicultural practices that a group of refugee primary school children develop in order to learn the target language (Greek) and also to become members of their learning community. The data come from an in-depth analysis of spoken classroom interactions and semi-structured interviews following a discourse analysis approach. The study suggests that multilingual research in education settings presupposes reflecting on participants’ multilingual complexities and that is why a multilingual transcription and presentation of spoken discourse is provided. Multimodal artefacts were also examined and provided valuable insights for children’s learning. The findings suggest that children experienced their languages coming together holistically and used them in a flexible way that mediated their learning and communicative interactions. The linguistic practices derived from this juxtaposition of languages were code-switching, translating and repeating. These linguistic practices were seen as scaffolding tools that enhanced children’s learning of Standard Modern Greek, as the interactional data provide ample evidence of children’s metalinguistic awareness. This study also provides examples of good teaching practices and considers that, when classrooms are seen as sites of multilingualism, refugee children’s linguistic and cultural backgrounds become visible tools and have positive learning outcomes not only for the minority but also for the majority of learners. I argue that the understanding of the Communities of Practices concept goes beyond assimilationist perspectives on learning as the data suggest that this flexible use of linguistic and multicultural resources enabled the participants’ roles to be reversed. I show that refugee children were not only expected to join in with the school’s learning practices, but their linguistic and cultural experiences were actively implemented in the learning process. Thus, in some cases, the majority of children also needed to claim their legitimacy during teaching. The study considers pedagogical implications and emphasises the need for a better understanding of issues of multilingual education for policy makers, researchers and educators in Cyprus and beyond to recognise the rich value of children’s available linguistic repertoires. This recognition will not only provide opportunities for language learning but will also add to the multilingual discourse that aims for social justice in education and wider society.

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