A Transformative Second-Language-Literacy Program for Migrant Students

Introduction

Today’s global world faces numerous incidents including wars, which still lead to mass migration movements throughout the whole world. Migration movements, which in fact, are as old as the history of humankind, have affected the lives of the migrant people as well as the people of the migrated country. This effect is mostly seen in educational systems in which the migrant children are tried to be integrated. The first and most crucial requirement is to teach these migrant children “the language of the migrated country’s educational system,” so that they become successful in order to be completely integrated into a new society. Language, and understanding its written forms in that target language in question, has always been perceived as the key for integration since the power of communication can be achieved through effective language teaching strategies.

In regards to Turkish Republic and its immigration status, Turkish educational practices take place officially in Turkish language as a representation of a monolingual writing system throughout educational and social settings. Recently, there have been massive migration movements from Syria to Turkey, which specifically took place since 2011 that brought high numbers of Syrian children into Turkey’s educational system unpredictably. In this context, Syrian people are referred to as “migrant” instead of “refugees” or “people under temporary protection”, and the situation is referred to as “migration” as suggested by International Organization of Migration (IOM, 2011) to define people groups’ place changing movement no matter what the reason, type or duration is.

Initially, Syrian migrant students were educated in Temporary Education Centers, and then these children were offered an educational model with the Turkish children within the same school setting two years ago. Turkey, similar to other migrant-receiving countries, was not properly prepared for this rather unknown situation as both the education system and its associated written curricula in effect have always been monolingual for homogeneous Turkish speaking students (Arslangilay, 2018). Perhaps more importantly, receiving massive numbers of immigrant students into Turkish schools is a radical change in society’s educational system that requires particular reforms in Turkish public educational system policies in terms of teacher education, course material preparations and curriculum preparation.

Curriculum is a process that should always be developed and evaluated according to the needs of the students, society as well as the whole world in context; therefore, significant educational needs due to migration movements should be reflected in the curricula of the migration receiving countries. In the first place, it seems clear that monolingual curricula are no longer effective in practice. By this definition, multilingual curricula that are both flexible and integrating should be developed in order to satisfy the needs of all heterogeneous populations in Turkish public schools. In order to shed light on this educational transformation, a model of a literacy curriculum that is part of a multilingual curriculum for Syrian immigrant children, will be proposed in this study.

For this purpose, this study will exemplify a flexible and effective multilingual curriculum practice that was formerly applied in Germany in order to adapt a similarly functional curriculum model for Syrian children within the Turkish context. Germany, which is a country of migration for more than 60 years, applied a program called the KOALA Project (Koordiniertes Alphabetizeirung im Anfangs Unterrict) for especially Turkish migrant children, who make up the highest proportion of migrant origin students in Germany. In this chapter, the KOALA project would be presented as a good example that could be adapted to the Turkish context. KOALA is a flexible curriculum practice that helps the migrant children’s progress both in the native language and German coordinately so that they will neither forget their own language and culture nor will be unsuccessful in the education system (Bingöl-Arslangilay, 2013; Nakipoğlu-Schimang, 2011a, 2011b). With this in mind, this chapter proposes an ideal multilingual approach for the recent migrant students’ literacy development within Turkish public schools by taking the KOALA project as a role model.