Communicative Competency for Female Refugees on the Shop Floor: Improving communication skills in the workforce Erasmus Project

Project Title

Communicative Competency for Female Refugees on the Shop Floor: Improving communication skills in the workforce

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for adult education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Migrants’ issues; Gender equality / equal opportunities; Access for disadvantaged

Project Summary

The CoCoFe project aim is to meet the language learning needs of female refugees and female forced migrants working in small scale manufacturing and retail environments. Females refugees and forced migrants living and working in their new country face many challenges. Highly-skilled/qualified candidates are attractive to professional organisations and there are a multitude of initiatives assisting this demographic. However, low-skilled female employees with relatively low-levels of literacy are not an attractive area of research to all organisations attempting to place and support female refugees and forced female migrants into work. Not only do these women face difficulties due to their gender, but they face challenges due to their lack of skills, qualifications and level of language knowledge. Once in work, they discover the working culture for a woman and the language employed by colleagues and society in general is very different from what they would expect in their homeland or in formal taught classes they may have been provided with once out of the reception stage of their resettlement in their new country of residence. One of the biggest obstacles is their understanding of the informal register of language used by their co-workers or the community in which they live. Often the language used at work in factories or retail environments is dynamic, full of idioms, neologisms and non-threatening expletives used for group cohesion. Speech acts are initiated differently, politeness varies as do conversational styles. A lack of language skills can lead to isolation, affect onward mobility in work and society.

In an attempt to bring women who are refugees and forced migrants and the local community together, the project’s objective is to establish a holistic grass-roots self-sustaining web-based platform for low-skilled female refugees, female migrants and local workers, principally females but not exclusively, employed in factories which will establish agency for the female newcomers. It envisages a platform both a web-based e-learning presence and a paper-published book to support women once in work. It seeks to establish a work/partner or mentor/mentee relationship and forge productive relationships, turning both female refugees and mentors into teachers and independent learners. This will be done by establishing a competency- and socio-cultural-based approach to language learning for the women and establish a collaborative digital learning platform.

The participants are Eurospeak Language school UK, Solution: Solidarité & Inclusion of France, Learning for Integration ry of Finland, Center for Social Innovation LTD (CSI) of Cyprus and Fundacion de Trabajadores de la Siderurgia Integral of Spain and the women themselves. The CoCoFe partners have a wide skill set and experience in managing projects related to social inclusion, Adult Education, Vocational Training and vocational training in general. The activities (of participants).

CoCoFe’s aim is to use onsite and virtual mentoring via free-web based platform, a self-published companion book for the website and on-site language clinics to help female refugees and female forced migrants in their new jobs, to encourage on-ward mobility in their job and exploit their latent talents. This would not only help the women and their families, but it would also help their local communities and society at large.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 154350 Eur

Project Coordinator

Eurospeak Language Schools Ltd & Country: UK

Project Partners

• Solution: Solidarité & Inclusion
• Learning for Integration ry
• FUNDACION DE TRABAJADORES DE LA SIDERURGIA INTEGRAL
• CSI CENTER FOR SOCIAL INNOVATION LTD