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Covid-19

Recent-arrival migrant students during the Covid-19 school closures

By May 25, 2020November 27th, 20206 Comments6 min read5,154 views

Elisabeth Barakos and Simone Plöger, University of Hamburg

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Editor’s note: Learning from home is hard enough but what if you are simultaneously learning the language of instruction? In this latest contribution to our series of language aspects of the COVID-19 crisis, Elisabeth Barakos and Simone Plöger share how new arrival students in Hamburg, who are still learning German, their teachers, and the researchers themselves have adapted to the lock-down. The call for contributions to the series continues to be open.

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A preparatory class for newcomer students in Germany (Image credit: SZ)

Since 16th March, schools in Germany have been closed and students need to learn from home. Learning from home is a huge challenge for many, especially recent arrivals. In Hamburg, newcomer students attend preparatory classes, where they learn German for about one year before being streamed into the monolingually oriented regular school system.

Like all other schooling, this preparatory German language learning is now supposed to take place from home. How are teachers, students, parents, and researchers adapting to these new circumstances?

Our research project – and how it has changed due to COVID-19

In January 2020 we started a research project to investigate the transitions from preparatory to mainstream classes in two secondary schools in Hamburg, with a particular focus on language learning. On the one hand, we focus on the language learning opportunities the schools implement for the students; on the other hand, we research students’ practices and experiences with a focus on how they can make use of the linguistic repertoires they bring to school.

When we started our project in January, we planned an exploration phase from March onward. The pandemic not only turned our participants’ lives upside down but also our field work plans at the school site. As our participants’ teaching and learning went virtual, so did we. We turned to methods from “virtual ethnography” (see e.g. Varis 2014) in order to get to know teachers and class contexts via emails, phone calls, and WhatsApp. This means that we use different communication spaces and digital ways in order to collect data. This way, our research continues, albeit virtually, as we adapt it to the new circumstances along with teachers, students, and parents. It also allows us to disseminate timely and novel findings on home schooling in preparatory classes during COVID-19.

Challenges of home learning faced by new arrival German language learners

Due to the school closures, the regular instruction in preparatory classes had to be changed to smartphone-based instruction. In one of our school sites, the German language teacher communicates mainly via frequent phone calls and chat groups on WhatsApp. The teacher differentiates the groups according to the students’ individual language level. Within the chats, she shares voice messages and uploads work sheets via link or photo. She also sends regular mail packages with additional learning material.

Unsurprisingly, this adaptation of teaching methods faces a number of challenges.

To begin with, the basic conditions for effective online communication are often lacking: for instance, students usually do not have their own email address; their access to computers at home is often non-existent or severely limited; mobile phones sometimes have to be shared with siblings; printing facilities are scarce and internet connections are often unreliable.

Second, communication and learning through WhatsApp-Chats and phone calls presents its own challenges. The smartphone screen is small and reading off a screen can be tiring. Furthermore, many students do not understand the task instructions as virtual explanations seem much more difficult to grasp than face-to-face ones. Teachers must therefore be highly creative when preparing lessons and adequate learning materials.

One teacher prepared this photo for students to practice prepositions

To exemplify: In order to practice prepositions and vocabulary about the topic of “home”, the teacher took photos of various objects and furniture from her own kitchen. She then sent the photos to the WhatsApp-Chat and asked each student a specific question about them (“Where is the book?” “Below the table.”).

In another example, the school used so-called cultural mediators who work as multilingual educators and support newcomer students and their families. In a phone conversation, one of them told us that she now worked as a “virtual interpreter”. When the father of a student collapsed, the family called her. She in turn called an ambulance and then translated between the medics and the family.

What the above examples demonstrate is the enormous administrative, creative and emotional labor that teachers and cultural mediators perform during this pandemic. They also show how much this type of labor and support depends on the individual person and their capabilities and investments.

Although our participants are extremely committed to their work, the examples also show the limits of distance learning: staying at home has significantly reduced students’ communication opportunities in German. Since a language is mainly learned through active communication and interaction with people, these limitations represent a great challenge for everyone involved.

The current situation demonstrates once again the importance for schools to integrate multilingual resources into their practices. As in many monolingual states, the linguistic diversity of the students is rarely taken into account in the German school system. Consequently, “one of the many lessons we need to learn from this crisis is to include the reality of linguistic diversity into our normal procedures and processes” (Piller 2020). This would mean paying specific attention to the students’ linguistic repertoires, looking for ways how to implement multilingualism in the classroom, and drawing on multilingual resources to provide information for parents and families.

Investing in preparatory classes as a space of social and multilingual learning

The work of cultural mediators as well as teachers shows that preparatory classes go well beyond language learning. Our research demonstrates that this type of class is also a social space where students meet schools in Germany for the first time. They probably meet their first friends within the new environment. In case of communication difficulties, they may resort to their classmates with whom they share their family language (which is much less common within regular classes). The preparatory class is therefore often some kind of “shelter” for the children – a place where they can arrive and find some calm and ease. In practice this also means that, in addition to verb derivation and vocabulary lists about springtime, topics such as residence permit or family reunification play an equally important role.

It is hence vital not to forget the preparatory classes and the newcomer students as Germany – and societies around the globe – discuss how to re-open schools. The teachers we speak to are worried that the preparatory classes could be disregarded. This fear is linked to previous experiences, which show that lessons in preparatory classes are the first to go whenever there is a shortage of teachers or a high level of absence due to illness. Furthermore, preparatory classes often lack reasonably equipped classrooms and digital resources. These shortcomings and the unequal distribution of resources are not new. The crisis has, however, exacerbated existing educational inequalities.

What, then, can we recommend based on our insights? For many students in preparatory classes, everyday school life signifies an important social and learning routine. In addition, they need active communication and interaction in order to continue learning German. That is why it is ever so important to include preparatory classes when gradually re-opening the schools.

References

Piller, I. 2020. “Covid-19 forces us to take linguistic diversity seriously”. A De Gruyter social sciences pamphlet: perspectives on the pandemic: international social science thought leaders reflect on Covid-19. Boomgaarden, G. (ed.). Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter.
Varis, P. K. 2014. “Digital ethnography.” Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies, Tilburg University.

Language challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic

Visit here for our full coverage of language aspects of the COVID-19 crisis.

Further reading

Richards, E. (2020, 2020-05-24). Coronavirus’ online school is hard enough. What if you’re still learning to speak English? USA Today.

 

Language on the Move

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Join the discussion 6 Comments

  • Enkhzaya+Regzendorj says:

    Thank you Elizabeth and Simone for this interesting but important article.
    This was one of the things I was worried about during pandemic. Even though I don’t have any school-aged children, I have been seeing other newly arrived immigrant parents struggle during a tough time. Adaptive time always needed newly arrived people to understand/familiar with a new culture, environment, and language learning, etc because they are at the stage of culture shock. As an international student, I clearly remember our first year in Australia was quite hard to balance out and blend into a new environment. There is no doubt that how hard newly arrived immigrant people are hit by the pandemic this year. And I have seen a lot of families decided to go back to their country due to the hardship of living in a new place. From parents’ perspective, parents themselves they may language barrier issues and they are not able to help with their children’s homeschooling, students still need some time to adapt to the new school environment and different education system plus online learning might have been inefficient compare to face-to-face learning.
    I have seen a lot of school-related posts from our community social platforms during school closure where recent arrival immigrants parents were seeking advice and help from other parents.

  • Nusrat+Parveen says:

    Dear Elisabeth and Simone
    Thank you for sharing your research and experiences here during COVID19. We had similar situation in Australian Primary/secondary schools. As a Primary school teacher in Sydney , Australia I can share similar experiences as you had in Germany. During Home school Our Newly arrived students and students from Refugee background struggled most in terms of inclusion, learning opportunities and overall in their well- being. Some new arrival students had no internet connections, technological devices and social inclusion. Therefore, some of them remained in isolation for the duration of 10 weeks of Learning from Home in NSW school. Our community language teachers and Community Language Officers did wonderful work to establish a regular connection with the families. But some families were too overwhelmed with the situation, language barriers and other social issues that they decided to take any support from school. Fortunately , it was only 10 weeks of Home schooling in our state and we could catch up on learning after this period of crisis. Our support for EALD
    (English as an Additional Language or Dialect) Program and support structure fell apart this time. But EAL/D teachers tried their best to post online language lessons and modify literacy contents for the students to follow. But I must admit it cannot surpass the value of Face to Face learning.

  • I really appreciated this article. In doing research on hypothetical ethnographic research that can be done to record changes in opinion regarding homeschooling here in the United States, I did not consider recently arrived migrant students and their unique struggles with this.

  • Laura says:

    Dear Elisabeth and Simone,

    Thanks so much for this insight into your research! It is great that you’ve been able to adapt your data collection to meet the constraints of researching remotely. There are some parallels with my own digital ethnography work, with students undertaking postgraduate study to become migration advisors. This is obviously quite a different setting, and one of the key differences is that the course they are doing was always offered online, so it has been designed much more systematically to be implemented in that way. I think this makes a huge difference and it’s really quite remarkable what teachers have managed to do when they have had to act very quickly to redesign and deliver remote learning. Your research is so important for uncovering all this invisible labour that may easily go unrecognized and unappreciated.

    One similarity I can see between the two settings is that many of the students in my project have a migration history themselves, and many have English as a second language. Some who I have interviewed have expressed a wish for more opportunities to meet in person to practice their migration advisor/client interview communication skills, as they – similar to your findings – identify the value of those opportunities. Much like you mention for your students, my research participants have also identified these types of face-to-face learning opportunities as yielding greater possibilities for making friendships and networking with other students – a very important source of support when starting out, often as sole practitioners, in their work.

    I hope that your research helps convince schools to recognise these broader resources that come out of face-to-face learning, and also that they offer greater support and recognition for teachers and students in the case that future/ongoing remote learning is needed. Excited to read more about your findings as they emerge!

  • Gegentuul says:

    Thank you for pushing the often-overlooked aspect of education to the forefront! And I really admire your flexibility with shifting research settings.
    The preparatory class is indeed a shelter and an important social space where the blow of new environment new language new people can be cushioned off a bit.
    This resonates with my personal experience to a certain degree: for me the one-year ethnic minority preparatory class before I started my study in a Shanghainese university helped me in two ways: familiarised me with Chinese-medium classroom instruction; and fostered enduring friendship with people who share similar trajectories and experiences.

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