Understanding Samir: educational difficulties of a high school student from refugee background

ABSTRACT

Students from refugee background enter Australian schools to pursue their educational goal. Though most do well academically, a few encounter educational difficulties and struggle to acquire English language. An exploratory qualitative case study approach was used to investigate  factors contributing to poor development of English language and academic progress and challenges associated with the assessment process. Samir, a 14 year old grade nine student from Syria, who has resettled in Australia took part in the study. The method involved generating hypotheses and collecting data from multiple sources. Samir, his teachers and parents were interviewed. A battery consisting of a receptive vocabulary screener, verbal and non-verbal cognitive tests and a phonological processing measure, was administered. Results indicated that Samir had an average nonverbal cognitive ability and emerged as a socially skilled student with good English language conversational skills. Nevertheless, he lacked academic-level English skills and had difficulties learning this language due to multiple factors, including a possible underlying Developmental Language difficulty and/or Specific Learning Disorder. These difficulties coupled with underlying stress led him to disengage with his studies, resulting in poor academic performance. The findings highlighted challenges associated with the assessment of a student with cultural and language barriers. Potential options for flexible assessment and teaching are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Assessment
• language
• learning difficulty
• schools

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to support Brisbane Catholic Education (BCE), BCE schools, staff and the student who participated in the study. The authors would like to thank Ms Anita Smith, Ms Bernadette Baker, Dr MariaRosa Mallardo, Ms Jane Wotherspoon and Professor Robert Schweitzer for their assistance with data collection and preparation of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Ethical standards

The authors assert that all procedures contributing to this work comply with the ethical standards of the relevant national and institutional committees on human experimentation and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2008.

Additional information

Funding

The project was supported by a Brisbane Catholic Education (BCE) Grant (no. 301) awarded to the authors in 2018 and in kind support of the authors.