[ANSWER]AED5001 Assessment 3 Research Proposals: Creating a Primary School Programme for Helping Traumatised Refugees Settle into the Victorian School System.

[ANSWER PREVIEW]

Primary School Programme: Countries that host refugees employ various school-based interventions to enhance the academic performance of refugees. A particular area of focus in curriculum interventions aimed at improving academic achievement in refugees is competence in the host country’s national or official language (Ferfolja & Vickers, 2010). Typically, refugees come from countries that speak a different language from the host country’s language (Matthews, 2008). Australia’s national language is English, which is by default the primary medium of instruction in schools. This presents a major challenge for refugee students from non-English-speaking countries, especially those that have never had any contact with English in their home country.

According to the 2006 census in Australia, more than a quarter (27.7%) of refugee children either could not speak English well or could not speak it at all (Paxton et al., 2011). Without adequate English competence, refugee students from non-English-speaking countries are likely to perform poorly in school due the difficulty of reading, writing and speaking in English (Ziaian et al., 2019)( Primary School Programme). Indeed, scholarly literature has demonstrated the association between poor English competence and poor academic performance among refugee and immigrant students in English-speaking countries, with undesirable outcomes like absenteeism and early exit from school being common in this group (Block et al., 2014; Graham et al., 2016; Paxton et al., 2011).

In Australia, ESL Primary School Programme such as Intensive English Centres are the major interventions schools use to address this problem (Ferfolja & Vickers, 2010). These programmes serve as foundational language classes before refugee students join mainstream schooling. Nevertheless, ESLPrimary School Programme in Australia face several limitations, including resource (financial and human) constraints, pedagogical challenges, and lack of refugee-tailored instruction (Ferfolja & Vickers, 2010; Matthews, 2008).

These challenges hamper ESL achievement in refugee students. Even when they have considerable exposure to English before arriving to Australia, many refugee students have difficulties in identifying and matching English letters and sounds, recognising visuals, making sense of patterns, ranking and listing, as well as written communication (Matthews, 2008). One of the factors responsible for these difficulties is schools’ little attention to academic language skills.

As many refugee students come to Australia with basic English conversation skills, teachers often assume that they can readily apply their conversational fluency to learning language subjects, math, science, and other content areas (Paxton et al., 2011). This is not necessarily the case as conversational fluency does not automatically translate to language proficiency. Indeed, refugee students with little or no exposure to English usually take 2-3 years to achieve conversational fluency, but they take 5-7 years to achieve language proficiency (Paxton et al., 2011).

ESL programmes are likely to be more impactful if they focus more on English proficiency as opposed to just conversational fluency. The problem of limited English competence in refugee students is further compounded by literacy challenges. Many refugee students in Australia come from countries that not only do not have English as their national language, but also with low literacy levels (Matthews, 2008).

Between 1996 and 2008, 21.4% of the total refugees in Victoria were from Sudan, with refugees from Iraq, Afghanistan, Ethiopia and Somalia accounting for 14.2%, 11.6%, 4.1% and 3.5%, respectively (Paxton et al., 2011). These developing countries have low levels of literacy compared to Australia and other developed countries. In fact, some refugees come to Australia without any formal schooling experience or with significantly disrupted formal education (Block et al., 2014)….[Buy Full Answer for Just USD 9: 5681 WORDS](Primary School Programme)

[Primary School Programme: SOLUTION DESCRIPTION]

Type: Essay

Word Count: 5681

Grade/Mark: 94 (Distinction)

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