Language for Resilience

I have two real passions in my life: English and multicultural world. My love for English broke down the substantial political barriers set by my home country’s administration. I’d studied abroad; I’d traveled to dozens of countries every time I fell more and more in love with the colorful multicultural world. Three years ago, I came to Finland to be with my husband. I became an immigrant. I thought it would be just as a refreshing and exciting adventure of settling into a new country, the same as I was studying or traveling abroad. A new culture, a new language, new opportunities were ahead. Then I started settling in, and the reality of immigration began to settle in as well. The culture shock followed the honeymoon feeling of meeting the new culture. The Finnish language was incomprehensible, and the feeling of being deaf-mute in the family, and wherever I went was overwhelming for months. When I started to speak a bit, the sense of sounding unintelligent and incomprehensible and inability to express everything I wanted to convey was suffocating and degrading. The new opportunities were offered in the professional fields that did not require the 7-year university education effort I’d done. I felt unintelligent and unintelligible, anxious, unwelcome, and even not safe for my future. Though I’m a linguist, only then I realized the real power the language holds over us and how essential it is to be able to express yourself and communicate and become a part of the surroundings.

Two years ago, my path took me to a school that provides primary education for adult immigrants, particularly refugees, coming from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Eritrea and other countries. I had a chance to teach English, guide the students in other classes, and provide help in daily tasks. It was probably the most emotionally rewarding teaching experience for me so far as we had a great connection with the students as we were settling in the new life and society at the same time. We all had our struggles in doing so. However, my efforts could not be compared to theirs. I came here voluntarily, had a connection and opportunity to visit my home, had a lovely Finnish family, and supporters who helped me with adaptation, and I knew English, which helped me establish communication tremendously. Most of them did not have all of the above. They came from conflict and war zones after experiencing terror; they left families and friends behind; they had no Finnish friends to support; they did not know any common language for communication with the surroundings. Knowing how I felt through all the integration experiences with the resources I had, I could not even start to imagine what feelings and emotions my students had after having gone through the traumatic experiences they had to go through to end up in that classroom.

Our emotions tremendously affect our learning. If we do not feel emotionally well, safe, or we feel unwelcome and threatened, we cannot learn. The language classroom is a great environment where a teacher can help their students to deal with the feelings in many forms. A teacher needs to develop a toolkit of role-play games, peer communication activities, encouraging to invent characters, and transferring the feelings inside to tell or write stories of these characters- all aimed at empowering students to speak about and let go of what has been suffocating them from the inside. The teacher has all the power to make their students feel safe in their classrooms and make sure they know it is encouraged to share their feelings, fears, doubts, insecurities in the classroom with peers and the teacher. Otherwise, the learning isn’t likely to happen, and all the negativity, stress, and depression will manifest in one form or another, preventing learning and success.

My experience as an immigrant and as a teacher of immigrants gave me a clear perspective about my role as a language teacher. A language teacher offers students a tool, using which daily makes all of us feel connected, being a part of a community, part of something bigger, being able to express who we are, what we can, and what we want. This tool encourages further growth and better life opportunities. Teachers give a tool for resilience when the reality around is being reconstructed, and life is built all over new in a new place.