ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Language, Culture and Diversity
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1656989
This article is part of the Research TopicIssues, Transformations, and Strategies in World Language Teaching and Learning: Administration, Pedagogy, Technology, and Learning OutcomesView all 5 articles
Host Language Learning and Sense of Belonging: the perspective of migrant students
Provisionally accepted
- 1Faculty of Psychology and Education Science, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal
- 2Universidade do Porto Centro de Investigacao e Intervencao Educativas, Porto, Portugal
- 3Universidade do Porto Centro de Linguistica, Porto, Portugal
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In this article, we explore the role of the host language, and of civic participation, in the integration and inclusion of adult migrants and refugees in the Northern region of Portugal. To do so, we set the research question "What is the role of the host language, its learning and its use in the integration and inclusion of adult migrants and refugees in Portugal?". This study draws on the works of Ager and Strang (2008), Narli & Özaşçılar (2020), O'Reilly (2005) and Silver (2015) to explain the establishment process that adult migrants and refugees go through in the host society, and is guided by the perspective that host language is not merely a communicative tool, playing a transformative role, enabling learners to move from passive positions to active, agentive ones (Grosso, 2016;Kuhlmann, 2016, Miranda & Fernandes, 2022). As sense of community plays a role in this process, we mobilize the model proposed by McMillan & Chavis (1986). The results come from an extensive qualitative study on the perspectives of adult migrants learning Portuguese as host language students in public schools and social organizations which included 20 semi-structured interviews. Our main results show the host language as facilitating these students' sense of belonging in the host society, boosting, on the one hand, their autonomy and self-confidence, which contributes to their empowerment, and individual agency; and on the other hand, the ongoing development of social relations and networks that counter isolation, exclusion, and marginalization.
Keywords: Host language, Education, inclusion, integration, interactions, sense of belonging, migrants
Received: 30 Jun 2025; Accepted: 19 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Queirós, Duarte and Ferreira. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Pedro Daniel Ferreira, Faculty of Psychology and Education Science, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal
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