Abstract
This chapter shares an overview of students with limited or interrupted formal education (SLIFE) in the United States and three other prominent English-speaking countries with a growing number of SLIFE: Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Thus, this chapter has been organized into four main sections: (1) introduction to SLIFE, (2) in-depth overview of SLIFE in primary and secondary U.S. classrooms, (3) overview of SLIFE in primary and secondary classrooms in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, and (4) six significant challenges SLIFE encounter at the primary and secondary levels in these four countries. Notably, the primary purpose of this chapter is to bring clarity to the current state and reality of the K-12 SLIFE population in the United States, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, as these four countries represent the largest recipients of refugees resettling in English-speaking nations.
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Notes
- 1.
In this chapter, I use and understand these terms the same way they are defined by Amnesty International (n.d.). Refugees are people fleeing their countries due to serious human rights violations and persecutions. Asylum seekers are people who left their country and are seeking protection from persecution or serious human rights violations in another country. Immigrants, sometimes referred to as migrants, are people staying outside their country of origin.
- 2.
In the United States, Spanish is commonly offered as a class that fulfills the world/foreign language graduation requirements at the middle and high school levels.
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Pentón Herrera, L.J. (2022). Students with Limited or Interrupted Formal Education in Primary and Secondary Classrooms in the U.S., Australia, Canada, and the UK. In: Pentón Herrera, L.J. (eds) English and Students with Limited or Interrupted Formal Education. Educational Linguistics, vol 54. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86963-2_3
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