- Find out who you could work with in your area. This will take time and you need to research both public and private provision. There will be colleagues within your own organisation, inside and outside your own department, who will have useful contacts. This works well as it means that you begin to raise the profile of language learning in your own institution, too. Depending on the kind of groups you wish to work with you are likely to find health providers, social care providers, charities, religious groups, other educational organisations who support and care for the disadvantaged.
- Make initial contact with the external organisation and then find out who is the best person to speak to regarding language learning. The more senior the person you get to meet, the more chance you may have of success. Support from an agency’s senior management was the key factor in the success of many of our sub-projects. And if you have pre-existing personal or professional contacts with an organisation this will help you to find a way in.
- Find out how the organisation works, what languages capability exists within the organisation (a languages audit is often a revealing exercise for any organisation) and what opportunities there are for language learning.
- Take time to understand the culture of the other organisation – it may be very different from the world of education. We occasionally found, for example, that an apparently more casual attitude to time-keeping and appointments than we were used to existed in some organisations. This could be frustrating but trying to keep to rigid time frames with certain client groups would probably not have been a successful tactic for these particular organisations. So there was often a good reason for what seemed to us, from the perspective of our own professional culture, to be unacceptable.
- Be flexible and keep an open mind about how you might fit in to existing structures and activities. Don’t try to impose a model that works within your own setting. The professionals in agencies have the best idea of the kinds of approaches and activities their clients respond to.
- Be prepared to find, as we did that, the majority of organisations providing for excluded groups welcome the offer of language teaching, although some have had to be persuaded of its value to their clients.
- Your skills in negotiation will be very important, especially when it comes to which languages you’d like to offer. We wished to teach as wide a range of languages as possible, including some of those less widely spoken and taught. Here we encountered a barrier, in that in most countries providers wanted to us to teach almost exclusively English. In England we faced the same situation with Spanish. There is an equality issue involved in this choice. People who are excluded from society at large often see learning English, in particular, as one route to being included in it and a language which will open the door to further opportunity.
- Agree aims and to find ways achieve them – and don’t be over-ambitious. Small is beautiful when it comes to this type of work. A short language learning experience – even just a few hours – can have an enormous effect.
- Find ways to overcome practical problems. Many marginalised learners will not attend regularly or you may be faced with sudden disruption to activities (prison lock-outs, for example). Some may be very reluctant to participate actively even if they attend a session – you need to be flexible and overcome these problems. Again the professionals within the agencies will be able to forewarn and advise you here. Close collaboration with them is essential.
- Develop together community-based, easy-to-access activities, tailored to the needs and interests of the learners
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