Teaching settlement in the CSWE curriculum.

Abstract

The objective of this classroom based case study is to identify, explain and describe settlement teaching that occurred during the enactment of the Certificate of Spoken and Written English (CSWE) curriculum to newly arrived migrants. The case study uses a narrative inquiry approach (Webster & Mertova, 2007) in order to identify settlement questions as they occur. Transcribed lesson segments demonstrate how settlement questions arose during the lessons. The students were immersed in the settlement topic of housing. Instructional materials were prepared to address the housing topic while also meeting the learning requirements of the CSWE curriculum. The settlement information that is revealed in this case study demonstrates that there are many items of general knowledge within a society that are not understood by those new to the society. It is these items of general knowledge that constitute settlement information that is relevant for newly arrived migrants to understand to assist them to learn to live in a new social setting. The settlement questions revealed in this thesis are concerned with housing, and demonstrate that by carefully selecting instructional material, the lecturer can nurture the development of settlement skills while teaching English. In this case study, it will be shown that the students began with learning their address and finding their suburb on a map, and ended being able to read rental advertisements, graph the cost of rent, and find rental addresses in a street directory. The housing topics that were discussed in the lessons were general knowledge that is shared by the host society. Migrants who are not aware of the social system of the host society may have difficulty in negotiating their new surroundings. The purpose of teaching settlement to newly arrived migrants is to increase general knowledge of our social systems thereby making it easier to make meaning of their surroundings and start a new life in a new culture. The analysis demonstrates that the questions that students ask arise in direct relation to the topic being studied. It was found that when studying addresses, questions arose regarding house numbers and when studying interest rates, questions were asked about mortgages. Furthermore it was found that in this research, the lecturer responded to the students using a Lave & Wenger (1991) model of “expert” rather than the model of discussion as suggested by Burns & McPherson (2004). Further research is suggested on analysing the questions asked by students under the new approach to teaching settlement in the Adult Migrant English Program (AMEP) whereby ten settlement topics are taught over a period of a minimum of forty hours. The research also found that when undertaking the test for filling in a formatted text, the students performed poorly on the spatial aspect of writing their address on a form. This is another area recommended for further research.