Refugees and asylum seekers constitute one of the most vulnerable groups whose inclusion into national education systems has utmost importance for children’s well-being, but it constitutes a major challenge for education systems of receiving societies (UNHCR, 2017a).  

As of January 2019, Turkey has received the largest number of refugees and asylum seekers all over the world by granting protective status to about 3.8 million people, 95.86% (3.6 million) of them being Syrian refugees (Turkish Department of Migration and Emergency Education [TDMEE] 2019; UNHCR Refworld, 2019).  Similarly, Germany is the top receiving country in Europe hosting 1.41 million refugees and asylum seekers of which Syrian refugees comprise of 40.16% (567.507) (UNHCR Refworld, 2019). Refugee children in both countries have to deal with the consequences of this protracted displacement resulting in either very limited educational opportunities or barriers to available educational services (UNESCO, 2018).  In this respect, well-established language support programs in the receiving countries are of great importance to ensure a smooth transition to public schools.

To ensure all children access to education and learn with Turkish children in public schools, a large-scale project called Promoting Integration of Syrian Children into the Turkish Education System (PICTES) was launched with €300 million budget in cooperation with the EU Delegation to Turkey in September 2016 as part of the €6 billion EU Facility for Refugees in Turkey (FRIT) which focuses on enhancing the well-being of refugees through humanitarian assistance, education, health, municipal infrastructure, and socio-economic support (Delegation of the European Union to Turkey, 2017; European Commission, 2019a). To overcome the language barrier, the PICTES project has recruited 4,500 Turkish language teachers who have delivered Turkish language training to over 400,000 children up to now in addition to catch-up and back-up classes benefited by 59,500 students (European Commission, 2019b).  

Similar to paradigm shift in Turkey, the influx of Syrian refugees in 2015 led Germany to acknowledge the fact that it is an immigration country with Angela Merkel’s public statement “Wir sind im Grunde schon ein Einwanderungsland” (We are, basically, already an immigration country) although it has received immigrants since the World War II through guest workers, resettlers, refugees, intra-EU immigrants, and family reunification (Teltemann & Rauch, 2018). Forced displacement, especially from Afghanistan and Syria, has led to a significant increase in the number of asylum-seekers and refugees in Germany since 2009 which has resulted in 1,680,705 persons seeking refuge as of December 2017 (Statistiches Bundesamt, 2018).  The share of persons of compulsory school age (6 – 17 years) is about 16.4% which corresponds to 275,635 children (Statistiches Bundesamt, 2018). 

The factors that may potentially influence the language proficiency of immigrant students in bilingual and multilingual countries are well-identified but there is much less evidence on factors associated with the language proficiency of refugee children in monolingual countries.  To this end, the present study explores the second language (L2) learning of refugee students in Turkey and Germany by scrutinizing the commonalities and differences in both contexts, and variables associated with the respective students’ language proficiency.  The study is embedded in Anderson et al.’s (2004)refugee education model which is a developmental model that connects Bronfenbrenner’s (1994)ecological theory with the pre-migration, trans-migration, and post-migrationphases (i.e., ecologies or factors). The study is grounded on the assumption that personal, familial and school-based factors, each of which refers to a distinct microsystem where children find themselves in pre-migration, trans-migration, and post-migration ecologies, are likely to influence L2 learning of refugee students. This talk will introduce the research and include the preliminary findings of the first qualitative phase in İstanbul.

To investigate the microsystems individually and address the relationship between the microsystems, we employ a multiphase mixed-methods design. Specifically, an exploratory sequential design is adopted which firstly involves collecting qualitative data to explore a phenomenon, identify themes, design instruments, and subsequently elaborate on them in the quantitative phase to explain probable relationships (Creswell, 2012). This design guides us understand the very recent phenomenon of the refugee education in Turkey and Germany with its qualitative phases and explore the relationships among the meaningful variables in the quantitative phases that may have an association with the language proficiency of refugee students. In this talk, we will present the findings of the pilot qualitative phase in Turkey which has a case study design to explore the contemporary phenomenon of refugee education within its real-life context to retain holistic and meaningful characteristics through a detailed and in-depth data collection by using multiple sources of information such as observations, interviews, and documents (Creswell, 2007; Yin, 2009). In collecting our first qualitative data, we will select two schools purposively from a densely-populated refugee district in İstanbul. In order to gain in-depth information about the challenges and opportunities of the language support programs, we will collect data through i) classroom observation, semi-structured interviews with ii) refugee students in lower-secondary schools, iii) refugee parents, iv) Turkish as a second language teachers, v) school principals and vi) key informants including migration researchers and policy makers. We will ask questions about the pre-migration, trans-migration, and post-migration experiences that are likely to influence the L2 learning processes including teachers’ opinion about the curriculum organization of language classes, their instructional strategies, and their perceptions about working with refugee students. We will select participants through purposeful sampling. Sampling criteria will be based on maximum variation to reflect the diverse opinions of all stakeholders on the language education. This strategy may be supplemented with snowball sampling strategy. Interviews will be conducted until saturation is attained to provide insight about the appropriateness of instruments. The overall data will be analyzed through content analysis to reveal the preliminary codes and themes.

At the end of this preliminary study, we hope to gain a better understanding of the trustworthiness, credibility and transferability of our data collection instruments which will be widely used in the main qualitative data collection phase to be conducted in Fall 2019 in Turkey, and later in Germany. We would like to discuss our first findings concerning the distinct pre- and transit migration of experience of the refugee students, family-related variables and school-related variables that will be scrutinized in depth in the qualitative phase with larger samples.

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