Forgotten refugees : understanding the language and literacy practices of Afghan refugees in Pakistan
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Most refugees arriving in permanent resettlement countries, such as Canada, come from first asylum countries, or countries that refugees move to first to escape the crisis in their homelands. Refugees arrive in permanent resettlement countries with various educational experiences and these pre-settlement educational experiences have largely remained undocumented, a phenomenon Dryden-Peterson described as a “black box” (2016, p. 131). In light of this gap, the purpose of this study was to document the language and literacy practices of young Afghan refugees in Pakistan in their homes, at school, and in their community, and to describe their parents’/guardians’ beliefs about language and literacy. Informed by sociocultural theory and Bronfenbrenner’s ecological theory, this qualitative study used ethnographic methods and focused on four Afghan refugee children and their families over five months. Language and literacy events were observed and analyzed using Miles, Huberman, and Saldaña’s (2014) procedure for qualitative research. Findings showed the children spoke Pashto at home but used Urdu and Pashto in the community. At school, the children spoke English, Urdu, and Pashto, but reading and writing were only taught in English and Urdu. The children participated in various literacy activities at home, including engaging in storytelling and practicing religious supplications. The female children were successful in their schoolwork and, with some assistance, could read and write in Urdu and English. The male children, however, could not complete most assignments that required them to read and write in English or Urdu independently and relied on their classmates, teachers, and resources (e.g., posters) to complete those assignments. In the community, the female children tutored others with schoolwork, Quranic reading, or religious supplications. The male children attended Quranic lessons to practice Arabic words to prepare for reading the Quran. Parents/guardians valued literacy and languages highly. Many believed that reading allowed one to see and that literacy instilled manners in one. This study enhances our understanding of the literacy practices of one of the largest refugee groups in the world, about which little is known. Specifically, insights about their literacy and language practices as they relate to codeswitching or translanguaging, and literacy brokering are revealed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".