Upcoming Event

Please join the Linguistics Reading Group for a colloquium with Johanne Paradis (University of Alberta).

The Arabic Heritage Language and English Second Language Development of Syrian Refugee Children in Canada

Even though there are commonalities among heritage bilingual children regardless of migration background, refugee children have some unique characteristics which could impact their bilingual development. Commonalities include the need to acquire the societal language (SL) in order to integrate into the education system and the broader community. At the same time, migrant children need to maintain their heritage language (HL) for family harmony and cohesion, cultural and linguistic identity, and to maintain ties with extended family abroad. For all bilingual children, individual variation in their bilingual development is modulated by multiple factors, in particular age and input factors. In contrast to other children with migration backgrounds, refugee children are likely to have more adversity prior to resettlement, including witnessing death and violence, being separated from family members, food and shelter deprivation, interruptions in schooling, and spending time in refugee camps, all of which pose challenges for their socioemotional development, and possibly their language development. Furthermore, by definition, refugee children are first-generation migrants, who can arrive in the host country at various ages, which means their acculturation process is more complex than it is for second-generation heritage bilinguals.

The resettlement of 45,000 Syrian refugees – the majority children and youth – to Canada from 2015-2019 provided the opportunity for researching their development over time in each language, as well as the factors modulating their development. Three studies from the Language, Literacy and Wellbeing project (cyrrc.org), a collaboration of researchers across Canada and across disciplines, will be presented. For this project, 133 children (6-13 years old) from three Canadian cities were followed during their first 5 years of residency in Canada. The first study is longitudinal and focused on the development of Arabic over time and the role that factors such as, age of arrival, language use among family and friends, engagement in Arabic activities and schooling in Arabic pre-migration, played in Arabic heritage language maintenance. The second study examined a range of expressive and receptive English second language abilities and the relative contributions of age and input versus more refugee-specific factors (wellbeing, adversity) in accounting for individual differences. The final study employed structural equation modeling to understand the direct and mediated relationships between acculturation, wellbeing and Arabic and English outcomes after five years in Canada. Mediators were language input factors. Overall, the findings reveal both resiliency and vulnerability in the bilingual development of refugee children, and indicate they are a unique group of heritage bilinguals in Canada.

Johanne Paradis is a professor in the Department of Linguistics and Adjunct Professor in Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of Alberta.