Language skills foster, among others, social inclusion, and access to education and employment. Within this context, non-literate or low-literate migrants have specific educational needs, as they must learn a second language while either learning to read and write for the first time or developing basic literacy competences in an alphabet or writing system sometimes different from the one they will have learned initially. When it comes to language or knowledge of society courses, these needs are rarely taken into consideration, and this group of migrants is rarely offered a sufficient number of hours to reach the language level required.

The Council of Europe Education Department embarked on the Literacy and Second Language Learning for the Linguistic Integration of Adult Migrants (LASLLIAM) project to support high-quality learning environments for non- and low-literate migrants. The project culminated in the development of the LASLLIAM reference guide by a group of experts. It aims at supporting language educators, curriculum designers and language policymakers in their endeavour to design, implement, evaluate and improve curricula tailored toward the specific needs of the target learners.