Supporting Refugees and Newcomers with English Learning

Course description

This special topic course is derived from the SLEEC (Syrians Learning English for Employment in Canada) project (2017-2022) funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). It is designed to provide a supportive and experiential learning space for students to explore the transferability of the SLEEC model's instructional approach, methods, and materials both among and beyond Syrian learners with refugee backgrounds. This flexible, interactive, hands-on course encourages students to explore the challenges and strategies for supporting English learning by refugees and newcomers of selected backgrounds in the key language domains. Students will engage in discovery learning to deepen their understanding of the content and to develop their instructional skills through tasks and involve sharing self-selected learner and language profiles, evaluating self-chosen resources or tools, and experimenting with lessons in their chosen domains of focus.