On 8th January the team welcomed Sarah Mercer of the Universitaet Graz for a steering group meeting at Action Foundation. The team discussed and planned the crucial piloting and evaluation stage which will begin in February 2019 ahead of a transnational project meeting in Leeuwarden in March.

The CSLW project has now entered its second year. The project aims to design and implement effective training tools for enhancing key skills and competences of (a) highly-skilled refugees and (b) the language teachers who work with them, and so enhance the employability and societal integration of skilled refugees.
The project is currently in its co-production stage. The Newcastle University team are working closely with volunteer language teachers to co-design a set of learner and teacher materials.
The main output of the project will be a toolkit comprised of two training modules:
- ‘Professional intercultural communicative competence for work and life’ (aimed at highly-skilled refugees)
- ‘Teaching professional intercultural communicative competence’ (aimed at volunteer teachers)
Project partners are the Universitaet Graz (Austria), Fryske Akademy (The Netherlands) and the refugee charity Action Foundation (https://actionfoundation.org.uk/).