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6 LEGACY IN ACTION
Breaking
the Language Barrier
AN EDMONTON PROGRAM HELPS ASYLUM SEEKERS WITH THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE THEY FACE — LEARNING ENGLISH
By Lisa Catterall
Moving overseas, away from family, friends and support networks, is a difficult thing to do at the best of times. But it’s infinitely harder when the relocation was unplanned, and
done out of necessity for survival to escape conflict, persecution or discrimination.
“Being a refugee claimant is a very vulnerable state and a hard place to be in,” says Anne-Marie Kallal, Executive Director of the Cultural Connections Institute — The Learning Exchange (CCI-LEX), an Edmonton-based non profit which offers language and cultural education to newcomers. “Refugee claimants are coming here seeking asylum, and they’re often overlooked in terms of the services that are actually available to them.”
For more than two decades, CCI-LEX has been helping newcomers to Edmonton, including refugee claimants, gain the linguistic and cultural knowledge they need to settle into their new homes and communities.
“If you imagine you’re new to Canada, you need English. If you don’t speak very much of it, you probably don’t have a high income, and a lot of formalized English-language training programs have waiting lists to get into,” says Kallal. “Without English, how can you move forward with building your life here?”
Unlike other newcomers, who may have planned for years to move to a new country, those claiming refugee status have often done so under accelerated timelines. Their statuses as refugee claimants are intended to be temporary while they wait to find out if they will be able to obtain permanent residencies. The problem is, access to many settlement supports — including many English-language training programs — is often limited to those with permanent resident status.