Inside S.P.A.R.K.L.E: What Teachers Need to Support Low-Literacy Learners
The S.P.A.R.K.L.E project facilitated five workshops in early 2026 across France, Italy, and Cyprus to capture the lived experiences of teachers who work with adult migrants, unaccompanied minors, and refugees. A total of 27 volunteers and professional educators participated, sharing what works in the classroom, where the gaps lie, and what support would enable them to teach more effectively.
This provides a grounded overview of current practices across diverse national contexts.
Current teaching practices
Across the three countries, teachers describe their work as highly pragmatic, experience‑based, and oriented toward immediate, real‑life communication, highlighting a strong emphasis on functional language use over formal instruction. In France, the session highlighted "survival French" and French for Specific Purposes, with a strong multisensory orientation that blends role‑plays, neighbourhood outings, photo‑reporting, movement‑based games, karaoke, line‑hopping, smelling‑memories, and human‑orchestra activities.
In Italy, the workshops highlighted a teaching approach centered on repetition, prioritising oral comprehension, and using practical, task-based simulations such as ordering pizza, shopping, navigating public transport, and completing identity card exercises. Teachers repeatedly use visual aids (flyers, menus, coins, maps) and physical objects (fruit, vegetables, tools) to anchor new vocabulary. Activities are deliberately short (10–15 minutes) to match learners' limited attention spans and to keep energy high, suggesting a need for highly segmented lesson design.
In Cyprus, participants rely heavily on visual support (pictures, videos), slow and expressive speech, gestures, and modelling. They employ repetition, gradual grammar introduction, dialogues, role‑plays, and everyday scenarios such as making appointments or ordering food. The virtual workshop introduced a blended "station‑rotation" model where tablets, tailored hand‑outs, and PPT (Presentation‑Practice‑Production) sequences guide learners through reading, writing, listening, and speaking stations.
This indicates emerging experimentation with blended learning approaches.
Familiarity with innovative methodologies
All groups report regular use of Total Physical Response (TPR) for commands, movement games, and classroom routines. The Communicative Approach is woven into daily practice through realistic dialogues, role‑plays, and task‑based simulations that mirror learners' everyday needs. Task‑Based Learning appears in activities ranging from supermarket visits to identity‑card creation, CV building, and interview preparation. These approaches appear to be applied intuitively rather than formally structured.
Digital tools feature unevenly. In Cyprus, tablets and simple apps support station‑rotation, flashcards, and audio recordings, while in Italy, digital access is limited to occasional YouTube videos, TikTok excerpts, or basic translation tools. Within this context, an emerging interest in AI‑assisted material design is noted. However, teachers stress that current technological constraints make complex platforms like "Kahoot" or advanced e‑learning unrealistic for their contexts, highlighting a gap between interest in digital innovation and actual feasibility.
Experience with Easy‑to‑Read (ETR) materials
Formal Easy‑to‑Read resources are rarely used, yet teachers across all sites already produce simplified hand‑outs, pictograms, large‑font worksheets, and visual dictionaries that embody ETR principles without naming them as such. This points to an existing, but informal, competence in accessibility practices. In France, Easy‑to‑Read resources reduce anxiety and boost autonomy; in Italy, simplified sentences and visual support help with both educational content and bureaucratic forms, though teachers acknowledge that even these adaptations can be too advanced for completely illiterate learners (A0 level). Cypriot teachers similarly simplify language, shorten sentences, and add visuals for lesson instructions, announcements, and flyers, while expressing a desire for systematic integration of ETR principles into official coursebooks.
Relevance and realism of the presented good practices
The most widely embraced practices are low‑tech, multisensory activities that can be prepared with minimal resources: use of real objects, short task‑based simulations, simple games, visual materials, and, where feasible, smartphone‑based digital literacy exercises. These approaches are perceived as both feasible and immediately transferable. Teachers in France and Italy already apply "line‑hopping", "smelling memories", karaoke, and human‑orchestra activities, finding them realistic with proper planning.
Practices that involve more complex digital tools or highly abstract tasks are deemed less realistic for the current learner profile. Concerns were raised about "tasting stories" (allergy, cultural, and health issues) and "desert island" activities (potential trauma triggers and gender‑sensitivity challenges). The bilingual GEFYRES handbook and mini‑lexicon generated interest in Cyprus, yet limited language coverage (English and Arabic only) restricts inclusivity.
This shows the importance of making learning materials adaptable and transferable.
Barriers and constraints
Teachers identify several intersecting obstacles. Learners often have attention spans of only 7–10 minutes, forcing constant activity rotation and limiting the duration of any single task. Heterogeneous groups with mixed literacy levels, mixed alphabetisation in mother‑tongues, and varying cultural backgrounds make uniform lesson planning impossible. Resource constraints are acute: limited budgets, scarce physical space, lack of ready‑made low‑literacy materials, and minimal digital devices force volunteers to self‑fund many of their supplies. Institutional factors—rigid curricula, misaligned syllabi, and inflexible assessment schedules—further hinder the adoption of innovative, learner‑centred methods. These constraints operate simultaneously, which compounds their overall impact.
Support needs and desired training
Across all workshops, teachers call for practical, ready‑to‑use toolkits. They need step‑by‑step facilitation guides, activity banks organised by everyday topics (food, transport, health), visual dictionaries, manipulatives (cards, objects, boards), and editable Easy‑to‑Read templates that can be adapted on the fly. Training should focus on managing short attention spans, trauma‑informed and culturally responsive pedagogy, rapid lesson adaptation, basic digital literacy for teachers, and low‑tech multisensory techniques such as image theatre, human orchestra, and object‑based learning. Teachers also expressed interest in learning how to harness AI for material design, even if its current application remains limited. This reflects a clear preference for practical over theoretical training formats.
Institutional support is essential: micro‑budgets for shared materials, flexible scheduling that allows small‑group work, and the possibility of teaching assistants to relieve pressure in larger classes. A peer‑exchange platform where teachers can upload adapted resources, share video demonstrations, and request feedback would address the strong desire for ongoing professional dialogue and mutual learning.
Looking ahead
The S.P.A.R.K.L.E workshops represent a key step in an ongoing process. The insights collected are now being translated into concrete project outputs such as a Teacher Toolkit, a User Guide and a syllabus, which are currently being developed.
These resources will be co-created by project partners, discussed during the teacher mobility at the end of August, and subsequently tested and implemented in language classes with migrant learners.