Aotearoa 2020: Accommodating limited literacy background learners.
Aotearoa New Zealand will expand its refugee quota, effective in 2020. This will mean increased need for English language development opportunities. Programmes already running in community and institutional contexts have much to offer as language programmes are extended to new towns and cities that will receive the new migrants.
This paper draws on already published research on language development needs for refugee learners in Aotearoa New Zealand, as well as Darvin and Norton’s exploration of identity and investment (2015) and The Douglas Fir Group’s transdisciplinary framework for language acquisition in a multilingual world (2016). It will foreground the experiences and the voices of learners with limited literacy in their mother tongue, through insights drawn from case studies of learners with limited literacy, developed from interviews, observations and portfolio writing tasks. It will offer examples of the influences of learners’ personal investments in their language development, and highlight instances where individuals asserted their own senses of agency and the consequent impacts on their learning experiences.
Finally, it will explore implications for teaching learners with limited literacy in their mother tongue, and offer insights for new support programmes which will be set up in response to the government’s change of policy.