Council of Europe tools to help those providing language support to refugees arriving from Ukraine
The Council of Europe has developed two set of tools to support member states in their efforts to respond to the challenges faced by those who are providing language support to refugees arriving from Ukraine, children and adults, as they adjust to their new environment. They are designed to assist organisations, teachers and volunteers who are providing language support for refugees arriving from Ukraine with no knowledge, or very little knowledge, of the language of the new country.
With regard to adults, the tools have been adapted from the Toolkit for adults which was developed as part of the Council of Europe’s Linguistic Integration of Adult Migrants (LIAM) project. This is available on this website.
With regard to children, the tools below have been created, or adapted, as being especially useful in the early stages of language support with newly arriving refugee children. These nine tools have now also been translated into the languages of the neighbouring countries receiving the largest numbers of fugitives from the war in Ukraine: Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Slovak/Czech, as well as French and Italian.
Tools for adults
Only available in English
The tools for children cover different areas.
You can download all nine tools together or only the one or those of your interest:
- Tool A offers general guidance on how to help children arriving from Ukraine to manage their spoken interactions with other children and people from the locality.
- Tool B contains recommendations for teachers and volunteers on issues relating to the background of these children and their most urgent needs
- Tool C invites reflection on the language support likely to be needed by children arriving from Ukraine and how it can best be provided. It also offers advice to people who have little or no experience of helping people to learn a foreign language.
- Tool D offers guidance on how to interact with such children during initial individual meetings with them.
- Tool E is designed to help those providing language support to gather information about the competences of children arriving from Ukraine in the languages which they know and about their interests and priorities. This tool includes a short questionnaire designed for that purpose.
- Tool F suggests some simple ways of giving these children opportunities to talk about themselves and their experiences. It includes lists of useful language functions and expressions (with translations in Ukrainian) that the children can learn to use for this purpose.
- Tool G suggests ways of helping children arriving from Ukraine to make sense of their first reactions to their new circumstances and surroundings and to adjust to them.
- Tool H provides some guidelines for teachers who are helping these children to adjust to the language used in the teaching of school subjects, as well as specific suggestions about how teachers can adjust their oral communication to make it easier for the children to understand.
- Tool I offers guidance on setting up activities which take refugee children out into the community and enable them to use the language they are learning in different settings.