TeachingEnglish podcast: How can I teach refugees, migrants and IDPs effectively?

Download the fourth episode, show notes and transcript from series 1 of our podcast 'British Council Teaching English'.

A young male learner sitting on outdoor steps, reading an exercise book

British Council: TeachingEnglish - series overview

In this ten-part podcast series from the British Council, we try and provide solutions to some of the key questions being asked by English teachers around the world. Each episode explores a specific topic through interviews, a focus on recent developments and reports on British Council initiatives in English language teaching. Practical show notes and transcripts are available to download at the bottom of the page.

Episode 4: How can I teach refugees, migrants and IDPs effectively?

There are in excess of 85 million displaced people in the world, with children under the age of 18 constituting around half this total. Whether a refugee, migrant or internally-displaced person, developing language skills can play a huge role for these individuals – and the host communities in which they live – to withstand challenges, recover from crisis and overcome barriers. We'll explore the British Council work on Language for Resilience to understand this further. Following on from this, we’ll speak to teacher and trainer Brian Lally about his work and research in Lebanon with Syrian refugees, and identify some core principles which teachers working in these challenging situations can use.

Show notes

Each episode contains downloadable show notes. These include the following:

  • Ideas for how you could use the podcast in your teaching
  • Detailed notes with extra information about the contents of the episode
  • Useful links
  • A lexical glossary of words and phrases from the episode, mapped to the CEFR 

How to listen or subscribe to the podcast

You can listen and subscribe to the podcast in the following ways:

Downloads

  • Episode 4 audio file
  • Episode 4 Show notes
  • Epsiode 4 Transcript

This episode is produced for the British Council by Chris Sowton and Kris Dyer

Comments

Submitted by Cath McLellan on Wed, 10/29/2025 - 09:26

Thanks for your feedback Mariemon - it's good to know that you found this useful, even though you are in a different context - unfortunately there are refugee and displaced learners facing all kinds of different challenges all over the world. Hopefully you can use some of these ideas in your teaching.

Thanks,
Cath

TeachingEnglish team

Submitted by Mariemon on Tue, 10/28/2025 - 03:13

We have had students who are victimsnof war in Mindanao, Typhoons,.landslide who have lost their loveones. Reading amd listening to teachers who are handling these kinds of learners especially refugees are a great help to me as a teacher as well on how to handle them. Philippines are prone to different calamities, especially typhoon and volcano eruptions, floods. We really have students who are victims of such traumatic events. Thank you for this.

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