From Language Policy to Language Learner: Refugee-Background Students’ Experiences of School in England

Abstract

While the UK resettles thousands of refugee children each year, those who seek asylum through irregular means are positioned as ‘illegal’ asylum seekers. Under the Hostile Environment, teachers are required to report people based on their perceptions of who looks and sounds like a legitimate immigrant, a policy based on Language Ideologies about how UK society imagines ‘illegal’ immigrants to speak, act, and therefore identify. With no education policy in place to support schools receiving resettled refugee children, it bears asking how the politicisation of refugees might affect their educational experiences. The little research that exists on refugee children in UK schools tends to focus on helping educators to welcome and support refugees given the lack of policy direction.

This thesis addresses a research gap by examining the experiences of refugee children who found themselves in an under-prepared primary school. The first research question asks which Language Ideologies are present in teacher discourses and practice as they work to identify and support their refugee children’s needs. Building on this description, the second research question asks how daily school life and teaching in this Language Ideology environment shapes the refugee children’s experiences of academic achievement, with the third question asking the same about their experiences of inclusion.

To investigate these questions, I conducted a linguistic ethnography with 5 refugee children at a Primary Church School supporting a deprived English suburb typical of resettlement areas. After 6 months of generating data through participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and artefact collection, I used Reflexive Thematic Analysis to examine teacher discourses and develop a description of the Language Ideology environment (RQ1). My findings suggest that this environment meant that teachers framed the refugee children as having similar needs to the local disadvantaged population and downplayed differences in favour of discourses of equality and diversity. Having found this, I then re-read and reduced my fieldnotes to critical incidents and employed Mediated Discourse Analysis to interpret the situated meanings of classroom life and, within this, the refugee children’s experiences of academic achievement (RQ2) and inclusion (RQ3).

The findings suggest that the Language Ideology environment of the school (RQ1) discursively framed students as alternately performing two contrasting identities, with refugee backgrounds de-emphasised in both. I use the term “Achievement Community” to refer to the school staff’s association of academic success with the performance of certain positively valorised ways of speaking and acting. The term “Disadvantaged Community” refers to discourses around how the use of non-standard speech and behaviour was associated with failure. The refugee children all experienced degrees of achievement (RQ2), but moments of difficulty were often ascribed to student deficits in speech and behaviour. This relates directly to experiences of inclusion (RQ3), with a requirement to speak and behave in Achievement Community ways leading to the effective erasure of non-school identities despite staff efforts to be inclusive.

Contrary to my initial concern, the refugee children in this study did not appear to experience negative framings because of their refugee background and their experiences of school were often positive. However, I conclude that the Language Ideologies behind teacher policy and practice unintentionally erased the refugee children’s pre-migration identities and instead positioned them as on trajectories towards identifying as Standard English speakers and British citizens. This has implications for how UK schools (and society) might productively change to meet the diverse needs of an increasingly multicultural society without compromising on educational achievement or social cohesion.

Date of Award	11 Oct 2023
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bath
Supervisor	Xiao Lan Curdt-Christiansen (Supervisor) & Lizzi Milligan (Supervisor)