‘Multilingual Society’: German Educators Call for Compulsory Arabic in Schools
SputnikNews.com
17.03.2017
The increasing popularity of Arabic courses in Germany reflects an understanding that Arabic is set to play an important role in German politics and society, German political scientist Naji Abbas told Sputnik Arabic.
In recent years Germany has faced the challenge of integrating over a million asylum seekers from the Middle East and elsewhere into its society.
Learning German is essential to finding work, and language instruction constitutes the basis of integration courses provided for refugees.
Germany’s Federal Employment Agency has set an ambitious target: it hopes to see half of all refugees employed within five years. Within 15 years, it wants 70 percent of refugees to have found an occupation.
However, refugees’ employment figures from last year underscore the scale of the task: between December 2015 and November 2016, just 34,000 asylum seekers from the eight most common countries of origin had found work.
At the same time, some government agencies have proposed extending services in Arabic so that refugees have better access to public services.
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