The aim of this talk is to reply to the several recent calls within SLA to focus more on societal impact by drawing attention to the needs of different learner groups. I am concerned with a group of learners—adult resettlement refugees with limited prior schooling—who have received limited attention in the field. At the same time, language learning is arguably particularly pressing for this group. In this talk, I present ethnographic research on the basic literacy learning of Nora, a resettlement refugee from the Democratic Republic of the Congo via Uganda to Norway. Based on Nora’s story, I argue that the precarity of the refugee condition—before and after resettlement—should be addressed to better understand refugees’ needs as language learners.
Speaker bio: Guri Bordal Steien is a professor of linguistics at the Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences. She was a postdoctoral fellow at MultiLing in 2013–2016. Currently, she is researching resettlement refugees form the Democratic Republic of the Congo via Uganda’s processes of learning Norwegian in (and outside) of the Introduction Programme.