Critical reflection on teaching language to migrants

Abstract

What does it mean to integrate a migrant person into ‘our’ culture? As professionals or volunteers who teach the national language to migrants, we must ask ourselves why: are we going to focus on the economic dimension or are we going to consider other dimensions? Do we understand integration through the teaching of the national language as a process of assimilation by the migrant? Or can we imagine the teaching of the national language as a dialogue of knowledge? As an intercultural process? An ethic of miscegenation? In this chapter, we are going to ask ourselves how to approach language teaching from a pedagogy of hospitality. This means thinking about the teaching of the national language as a process of decolonisation of the host’s knowledge and inviting the narratives, experiences, culture, art, the everyday life of the guest, as words to be translated dialogically, in such a way that they allow the newcomer to discover the host culture from a critical point of view that allows him/her to unravel the threats and dangers, as well as the opportunities that are hidden behind the symbols and codes of the other, for the moment, unknown. We think words, learning words is not just talking but thinking. A pedagogy of hospitality proposes to educate by learning from the one who learns by educating us, it contains a space for listening so that the language taught can dialogue with the language of the migrant person. A pedagogy of hospitality, in order to understand otherness as a potential friend, must begin by eliminating the prejudices that its language harbours towards migrants.