Teaching English to Refugees: Teachers’ Self - efficacy, Cultural Competency and Preparedness in Meeting Refugee Students’ Needs and Linguistic Challenges

This study aimed at investigating the challenges refugees face learning English language, the challenges of their teachers, and the adequacy of teacher education programs in the context of the study. It also aimed to find out the connection between these challenges. A mixed-method research approach was implemented by employing two instruments, the first one is the questionnaire that was distributed to English language teachers of refugees, and the second one is the semi-structured interview sessions that were conducted with refugee learners of English, English language teachers, and educators. The qualitative collected data were analyzed employing thematic coding criteria, meanwhile, the quantitative collected data were analyzed employing SPSS version 25. Findings and results showed that refugee learners of English in Jordan face linguistic and psychosocial challenges learning English as a foreign language and their teachers face challenges associated with self-efficacy, cultural competency, teachers' preparation, and the practices they implement teaching refugees English. Challenges such as training teachers of refugees were faced teachers preparation program. The model showed connection between the challenges as follows: teacher preparation has a significant influence on self-efficacy, implementing practices and cultural competency, a significant impact of self-efficacy of teachers on student needs and their linguistic challenges, meanwhile implementing practices on student needs shows to be not significant. The results from this research might help paving the path for next steps in supporting refugees to learn English language and would provide the community of practice with the critical awareness about refugees challenges learning English language and the challenges that were faced by their teachers, teachers educators and teachers preparation programs. Keywords: Refugees, ELT, Learning Language Challenges, Teaching Language Challenges.