Mosaik’s ‘Embed English’ Tool

Refugees need English language skills for work and study. There are huge amounts of free resources and companies will to offer free subscriptions, offering huge potential. But most are not contextualised and do not offer peer interaction. Mosaik’s Embed English tool addresses the challenge of how to enhance and contextualise the range of open and free English resources and programmes available to refugees. 

English language skills are a significant barrier to refugees in accessing training, livelihood opportunities and tertiary education, with a B1 or B2 level of English on the ‘Common European Framework of Reference for Languages’ (CEFR) usually required for online courses, local universities or overseas scholarships.  

Low language skills are caused by minimal ELT in refugees’ country of origin and further perpetuated by a lack of access to  quality learning opportunities during displacement. Improving teaching practice is crucial to supporting refugees to gain English language skills. 

At the same time, the world is not short of English language teaching resources: there are millions of open English language teaching resources, lesson plans and apps available online. Mosaik also knows there is no shortage of private providers willing to offer free books, licences or content to refugee students or teachers of refugees. However, these resources are often static grammar or vocabulary based resources. They are extremely scalable, but they do not provide the learner with opportunities to ground content in their own experience, or to develop fluency and interactive skills with peers. The challenge, therefore, is how to adapt and contextualise the offers of these programmes, leveraging the immense potential of scale, whilst making it adaptable to the lives of refugees. 

Mosaik’s Embed English tool is a web app that supports English teachers to integrate teaching activities that prioritise interaction, communication and the leveraging of students interests and experiences. 

The web app hosts activity descriptions, teaching guides and assessment tools, all of which are aligned to international English teaching frameworks, such as the Common European Framework for Languages. This means they can be easily transposed to enhance many of the open and free resources available to refugees.

The key features will of the English Embed tool include:

• Teaching activity cards that guide and structure individual classes and entire course. The teaching activity are based on a 'communicative' teaching approach called Dogme, which prioritise interaction, production and the learners interests

• A tool to sort and filter activity cards according to needs, teaching frameworks and programme syllabus. Activity cards are also tagged with key competencies (again drawn from international frameworks), to allow teachers to quickly identify activities that suit the student need or competency area that course is addressing. 

Mosaik’s ‘Embed English’ tool supports English language teachers of refugees in Jordan. These are either local Jordanian teachers or teachers from the refugee community, working at community organisations that offer free or low cost English language courses. 

Indirectly, via teachers, Mosaik is supporting refugee communities who are learning (or would like to learn) English. The activities contained in the Tool are designed for youth and secondary school age children. Although the Embed tool provided to teachers is not specific to supporting specific intersectionalities, Mosaik has found the methods are inclusive learning strategies to leverage the backgrounds and lived experiences of marginalised students. We have collected evidence highlighting the the positive impact on Sudanese and Somali refugees in Jordan, who are minorities within the refugee community and receive particularly high levels of racial discrimination and abuse. 

Refugees have few resources to pay for high quality language courses. Therefore, free courses that are offered tend to draw on out of date, irrelevant or didactic course materials. 

The British Council has highlighted the need for more relevant and communicative teaching and content to create stimulating environments, and methods beyond course-book based classes. 

The effect of the Embed Tool tool is that it enables teachers and organisations to enhance their existing programmes with resources that can be easily integrated and aligned to existing or new programme curricula. 

Mosaik Education has significant experience of working with young refugees and the community organisations and teachers that support them: we have been designing and delivering online education programmes for refugee youth in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey since 2019, including English language programmes. 

The content of the Embed English tool has been developed with Mosaik's English teachers, who themselves are refugees. The content has been drawn from a teacher training package and subsequent iterations of this training and teacher support since 2020. 

We ran observation and reflection sessions with our teachers to generate their insights as to how to adapt and apply the approach, as well as supporting improvement of their own practice. These teachers were also involved in informing design decisions, as well as leading consultations with other teachers of refugees through focus groups.  The refugee teachers have been essential in contextualising design and the teaching practices. 

Mosaik’s team also includes several former English teacher trainers, online learning designers and subject matter experts on  communicative language teaching.

Mosaik has already tested and found positive outcomes from the use of the teaching activities contained in the Embed English tool, and we have built a minimum viable product (MVP) version of the tool that is being used by teachers in Jordan and Lebanon. However, we require advice on support on four crucial areas to help the tool progress in scale and impact:

• Partnerships: Mosaik has good knowledge of and networks with local community organisations. We also have good networks with the international community working with refugees, such as UN agencies. However, in order to make our tool effective, we would benefit from exposure and networking opportunities with large English language teaching publishers and businesses. We know that they are keen to support refugee populations if they can. But they are reluctant to create bespoke programmes. We would seek to better understand how it could be useful to large English language teaching publishers and businesses, and whether there are opportunities for direct integration between software.

• Advice and coaching on technology strategy to improve the design to better integrate across multiple curricula. Currently, we have built a simple web application, which allows teachers to self reference and search for activities. But We believe there are opportunities to use other types of applications, such as browser extensions and native applications, and APIs. However, we do not have the skills in this area to make solid judgements.

• We would also work with the Solve staff and members to help develop an approach to monitoring and evaluating the impact of our tool that can be simply communicated with the stakeholders in the international community and the education sector. 

• Business model: Mosaik’s current business model is to reduce content production costs by leveraging existing English programmes and resources, which fundraising specifically for tools and support in adapting these programmes using tools such as English Embed. We believe that this model makes it clear and transparent what donors our funding. However, we need to better develop profiles and needs for funders that are outside of Mosaik’s main current source of funding, philanthropic foundations.

The Embed English tool is innovative in three ways:

• It applies an innovative and needed pedagogical to a new context. Despite the Dogme approach addressing needs for interactive and stimulating environments found in refugee contexts, it has not been offered or adapted for teachers of refugees. The evidence Mosaik has collected so far highlights that the Toolkit enables teachers to achieve significant enhancement of existing English language programmes for refugees

• It enables the leveraging of vast amounts of existing English language teaching resources, and enhances the intention of global English teaching businesses to support refugee communities. 

• It leverages of existing technological innovation to use digital resources to scale at low marginal cost

The next year

- Improve the technological integration capabilities of the Embed English tool

- Grow the the user base to 100 teachers

- Market the Tool to international agencies, English teaching businesses, and  teachers at community organisations 

- Develop robust data on impact on teaching practice and student interactions

The next five years

- 5000 teachers signed up to the Tool

- Strategic partnerships agreed with English teaching businesses providers and international agencies

Impact indicator:

Refugee youth achieving a tertiary education or vocational training level English scores. % of refugee youth achieving a B2 score  (disaggregated by gender, nationality, age, disability) This indicator measures the proportion of refugee youth who are able to achieve an IELTs score of 5.5. or a B2 grade on the CEFR framework. 

Outcome indicators 

1  Refugee youth with improved quality of language production % change in syntactic complexity, fluency and accuracy scores of language produced by refugee learners 

2 Increased learner motivation and enjoyment of learning English: % of students reporting an increase in learner motivation, enjoyment and confidence in English. 

3 Increased knowledge and confidence of teachers in using communicative teaching techniques: % of teachers reporting an increase knowledge and confidence in using dialogic teaching methods reported by teachers undertaking training

The core technology is a web application that hosts and organises the materials and activity cards for teachers.

The rationale for building a web app is to host the resources in a way that can be more managed and accessed at scale.

A key feature of the web app is that the activities can be  sorted and selected according to teacher input, and that the activities are aligned to international frameworks and programme syllabus. This requires a dynamic web application, rather than a responsive website hosting content. 

The development of a native iOS or Android app has been avoided thus far , as pursuing a web app is a) cheaper and quicker to develop and deploy than a native app and b) Mosaik’s research indicates that beginning with a web app provides more flexibility to adapting to native apps.

Mosaik supports inclusive leadership, particularly that of refugees, at multiple levels of the organisations. This is evidenced by the fact that three refugees were a part of the team creating Tool to work with subject matter experts and learning designers to provide feedback, contextualise the tool and prioritise decisions. 

Mosaik still has significant work to do to institute diversity and inclusion practices at the organisation. However, Mosaik is already a fairly diverse team - majority of the team are female, people of colour and from countries affected by the refugee crisis. Two thirds of the board are women and one third are people of colour.

One of Mosaik’s core principles across all of our programmes is the use of participatory design, where decisions on the design and refinement of programmes are prioritised with refugees who are previous or prospective participants in the programme.

We will target three methods of revenue generation. 

1) Philanthropic foundation / aid agency grants: this funding will make up 60% of revenue; this group of organisations will be motivated to fund the Embed Tool, because we are reducing costs by leveraging existing English programme content; and we are enhancing English teaching for one of our their intended beneficiaries - refugee youth

2) International agency e.g. UNHCR or INGOs: strategic partnerships to contract Mosaik to licence the tool to their partner local community organisations to improve the quality of language learning in their programmes

3) English teaching businesses: CSR partnership donations - in establishing partnerships that make use of their existing content, Mosaik will be able to identify relationships with these partners that could be converted into funding for the Embed English Tool.

Humanitarian Education Accelerator (UNHCR/IDEO.ORG) grant 2020

Open University grant 2021

Connected Learning in Crisis Consortium grant 2021

Al Tajir Trust grant 2022