From Classroom to Community: CREATE and the Case for Creative Second Language Learning

Generation for Change CY

The summer nobody plans for

Every June, something predictable happens in Cyprus. The school year ends and, for most teenagers, the calendar refills almost immediately with summer camps, private tutoring, sports clubs, family trips and holiday jobs arranged through a parent’s contacts. For migrant and refugee teenagers, the same calendar tends to empty. Many live in households where every adult is working long hours or waiting on a decision from the Asylum Service. Many live in shelters or in accommodation with little space and no cooling. Almost all of them will return in September to a school system that teaches in a language they are still building.

This is the gap the CREATE project was designed to close, and it is the gap Generation for Change CY has been working inside for the past two years. The evidence on what is at stake is not ambiguous. Analysis of PISA data across OECD countries identifies fluency in the host country language as one of the central sources of disadvantage for students with an immigrant background, and finds that language barriers amplify other disadvantages, including socioeconomic hardship and arrival in the host country after the age of twelve (OECD, 2018). Our learners are aged 13 to 18. Almost every one of them arrived after that threshold.

What CREATE is

CREATE, Creativity in Education for 2nd Language Learning, is a two-year action co-funded by the European Union through the Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund. It launched in April 2024 under the coordination of Faros in Greece and brings together Generation for Change CY in Cyprus, Glossomatheia in Greece, Dedalus and Oxfam Italia Intercultura in Italy, the French Red Cross in France, and Open Cultural Center in Spain.

The general objective is direct: to improve the effectiveness of second language learning within non-formal education, and to equip migrant teenagers with the linguistic tools to enter both the host community and the formal education system on their own terms.

Around that objective sit concrete targets. A desk study gathering European and global best practice in language training. Two learner workbooks at A1 and A2 levels, comprising ten learning units, developed by every partner and now available in Greek, English, Italian, Spanish and French. One teacher’s manual. National educator trainings across six countries. Six hundred young people receiving free language courses. Accredited A1 and A2 assessment through the GlobalCert National Open College Network in Athens, so that what a student earns in a community center converts into a certificate that carries weight outside it. And an e-learning platform to carry the methodology past the closing date of the grant.

Why we teach the way we teach

The most contested decision in the CREATE curriculum is also the one we defend most confidently. We do not teach grammar explicitly.

This is not a shortcut. It follows the Communicative Language Teaching tradition and the action-oriented approach that underpins the Common European Framework of Reference. The Council of Europe describes the learner not as a student of a subject but as a social agent, a member of society with real tasks to accomplish in a specific environment, and treats language as the vehicle for those tasks rather than as an object of academic study (Council of Europe, 2020). A teenager who needs to register at a clinic, question a landlord, or join a conversation at break time does not need a paradigm table. They need to be able to do the thing.

The research points the same way. A meta-analysis of task-based language teaching drawing on 52 studies found a strong positive effect on learning outcomes when compared with grammar translation and traditional presentation and practice pedagogies (Bryfonski & McKay, 2019). A subsequent reanalysis using stricter inclusion criteria placed the effect more modestly but still clearly positive (Xuan et al., 2025). The direction of the finding is settled even where its size is debated: meaning-focused, interactive instruction outperforms drilling, and it does so most visibly for learners whose motivation depends on seeing immediate use for what they are taught.

Our workbooks build on this with storytelling, digital tools, and a deliberate reframing of error correction. Mistakes are treated as information rather than failure, addressed through structured feedback using the Rotation Model rather than public correction. For young people who have frequently been made to feel deficient in a new country, this is not a pedagogical technicality. It is often the difference between a classroom a student returns to and one they quietly stop attending.

We started with the educators.

Before we taught a single teenager, we trained the adults. On 7 and 8 March 2025, in collaboration with the Cyprus Pedagogical Institute and Glossomatheia, we delivered a specialized training for 27 educators in Nicosia. The sessions covered grammar-free language teaching, storytelling and technology in language learning, and error correction as a learning tool, combining presentations with hands-on activities and interactive discussion. Every participant received a certificate and full access to the CREATE teaching manuals. Our thanks remain with our trainers, Aggeliki Koureta and Maria Davou.

Cyprus was one node in a wider network. Over the same period, the French Red Cross trained 28 educators in Montrouge and Saintes, Open Cultural Center reached 42 participants through a hybrid training in Barcelona, and Oxfam Italia convened 25 educators, teachers and mediators online in Florence alongside a training in Naples for school staff, social workers and reception sector professionals. Several hundred European educators now hold a shared methodology.

This is the part of the project that will outlast it. Every educator trained carries the approach into classrooms CREATE itself will never enter.

Summer School 2025: 100 hours and everything around them

Then came the students. Between 16 June and 8 August 2025, we ran a free 100-hour A1 to A2 Greek course at our Empowerment Center in Nicosia. On 8 August, 46 young people graduated, from Syria, Poland, Afghanistan, Cameroon, Pakistan and elsewhere. The 100 hours are the headline. What surrounded them is the argument.

Our participants did not arrive at a rented classroom, sit for four hours and leave. They came into an air-conditioned building with a mini library, board games, a PlayStation 5, study areas, creative workshops and excursions, with snacks and refreshments provided by Coca-Cola HBC Cyprus and learning supplies donated by UNHCR Cyprus. Every element of that was deliberate.

Cooling is not a comfort item. A study tracking 10 million students found that hotter school days measurably reduce learning, that the damage concentrates among students without access to cooling, and that air conditioning largely offsets the effect (Park et al., 2020). In a Cypriot July, a cooled room is a teaching resource before it is a courtesy.

Nor is structured summer provision an optional enrichment. The long-running Baltimore panel study found that the achievement gap between higher- and lower-income students at the start of high school traced primarily to unequal summer learning across the earlier years rather than to what happened during term time (Alexander et al., 2007). Schooling equalizes, and summer divides. For families managing precarious incomes and insecure housing, a free and structured summer program is the difference between eight weeks of accumulation and eight weeks of quiet loss.

The social outcomes carry as much weight as the linguistic ones. A meta-analysis of after-school programs found significant gains for participants in self-perception, school bonding, positive social behavior and academic achievement (Durlak et al., 2010). A systematic review of displaced children resettled in high-income countries identified stable settlement and social support in the host country as protective factors for psychological functioning (Fazel et al., 2012). A room where a 15-year-old from Aleppo plays a board game with a 15-year-old from Yaoundé is doing serious work, whether or not anyone in the room describes it that way.

There is a household effect as well, and it goes unrecorded in most funding reports. For eight weeks, parents, guardians and shelter staff knew where their teenagers were, and knew they were safe, fed, cooled and learning. That is time returned to caregivers who are working, job seeking or navigating asylum procedures or the realities of living outside your home country. We thank the families and shelter teams who coordinated with us daily to make attendance possible. Their collaboration was the operational backbone of the summer.

What happens when they come back

On 27 October 2025, we opened the CREATE After School Program: 100 hours delivered at five hours per week across 20 weeks, running through April 2026, with rolling enrolment throughout. Fifteen learners progressed through the autumn and winter, gaining confidence in everyday Greek, strengthening their academic skills and becoming more socially connected. The same recreational infrastructure stayed open to them.

The finding we consider most significant, though, is not a number. It is a pattern. Young people who completed the summer course came back in October. Several of those have returned this June again. They come back partly for the Greek and substantially for each other, for friendships formed in a room where nobody had to explain why their accent was different.

This matters because language acquisition is a function of sustained exposure, and sustained exposure is a function of whether a learner keeps showing up. Short cycle interventions rarely solve retention. Ours has begun to, not through attendance policies but through belonging.

Summer 2026, and what comes next

Our 2026 Summer Greek Language School opened on 22 June and runs to 7 August: 84 hours at 12 hours per week, in-person A1 and A2 classes at the Empowerment Center on Themistokli Dervi 43 in Nicosia. Twenty-nine students are enrolled and learning as we write. The 2025 edition ran to 100 hours across a longer window; the 2026 edition delivers 84 hours at a higher weekly intensity, an internal adaptation made in response to what we learned about attendance and pacing in the first summer. Coca-Cola HBC Cyprus and UNHCR Cyprus have again stood alongside us. Across our CREATE course rounds in Cyprus, we have received 167 registrations to date.

At consortium level, the A1 and A2 certification tests have been submitted to NOCN in Athens for accreditation in Greek, Italian, Spanish and French. The e-learning platform is close to release. Final national events and a closing European event will present the results across all six countries.

We will keep repeating what this project has taught us. Language provision for migrant and refugee teenagers is not a supplementary service bolted onto integration policy. It is the precondition for everything that policy hopes to achieve: school completion, employment, civic participation, health literacy and personal safety. A young person without the language of the country they live in is structurally excluded from all of it, however many rights are written down on their behalf.

Forty-six graduates, 15 after-school learners, 29 students currently enrolled and 27 trained educators do not resolve that exclusion. They demonstrate that it is not inevitable.

CREATE is funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are, however, those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them. Project Number: 101140913.

References

Alexander, K. L., Entwisle, D. R., & Olson, L. S. (2007). Lasting consequences of the summer learning gap. American Sociological Review, 72(2), 167–180. https://doi.org/10.1177/000312240707200202

Bryfonski, L., & McKay, T. H. (2019). TBLT implementation and evaluation: A meta-analysis. Language Teaching Research, 23(5), 603–632. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362168817744389

Council of Europe. (2020). Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, teaching, assessment – Companion volume. Council of Europe Publishing.

Durlak, J. A., Weissberg, R. P., & Pachan, M. (2010). A meta-analysis of after-school programs that seek to promote personal and social skills in children and adolescents. American Journal of Community Psychology, 45(3–4), 294–309. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10464-010-9300-6

Fazel, M., Reed, R. V., Panter-Brick, C., & Stein, A. (2012). Mental health of displaced and refugee children resettled in high-income countries: Risk and protective factors. The Lancet, 379(9812), 266–282. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(11)60051-2

OECD. (2018). The resilience of students with an immigrant background: Factors that shape well-being. OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264292093-en

Park, R. J., Goodman, J., Hurwitz, M., & Smith, J. (2020). Heat and learning. American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 12(2), 306–339. https://doi.org/10.1257/pol.20180612

Xuan, Q., Cheung, A., & Liu, J. (2025). How effective is task-based language teaching to enhance second language learning? A technical comment on Bryfonski and McKay (2019). Language Teaching Research, 29(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/13621688221131127