ESB: EGP Caglayan: Gender, Language, Inclusion and Empowerment German Learning Experiences of Recent Immigrant Women

Gender, Language, Inclusion and Empowerment - German Learning Experiences of Recent Immigrant Women

Learning the language of the host country fluently is one of the leading factors that facilitate both inclusion and entry into the labour market (EC Migration Policy Group, 2018) for immigrants/refugees. Considering immigrant/refugee women, another advantage of learning the host country’s language is that they can avoid being dependent on others, particularly male members of the family, in order to establish relationships with the outside world. Learning the language of the Country of Hosting (CH) is an empowerment tool for women in the family, not only in terms of economic and social empowerment, but also in terms of psychological resilience and coping with domestic violence. In the event of a lack of fluency in CH's language, women may remain in a dual negative status because they are both immigrant and women.
Therefore, it is important to reveal the factors that facilitate and/or complicate migrant women’s choices to learn the language of host country – factors such as how domestic tasks are shared between women and men in the family, or perceptions about gender roles that have been “imported” from the home country into the host country. They form a translocal influence on women’s success in learning the language of CH. Having said this, the degree of gender sensitivity of CH’s social policies targeting immigrants must also be taken into account. The study will focus on this two-fold dimension and on recently migrated Turkish and Kurdish women’s experience of learning German in Germany as a case in point to examine the question:
How can a gender-sensitive translocal perspective facilitate migrant women’s capabilities in language learning and thereby serve their empowerment?