Returning pupils face language barrier

Ali spent six years in Germany, attending school and learning the language. But after the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024, his family decided to return to Syria in early 2025. Now the 11-year-old is attending school in Syria, but he's struggling with his native language.

"I make mistakes when I'm reading, and my classmates laugh at me," Ali says in a quiet voice. "I don't dare to participate anymore and prefer to sit at the back of the classroom." He says he can hardly follow the lessons.

Many children face similar challenges. According to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), almost 1.2 million Syrians, including many children, have returned to their homeland since the fall of the regime. Soon, there may be even more: the Syrian media outlet Enab Baladi estimates the total of children who could return from abroad at around 1.5 million.

For years, Syrian children have been living abroad, in neighbouring Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, as well as European countries like Germany. There, they have been attending school and receiving lessons in German or Turkish, or Arabic with Lebanese and Jordanian dialects. They integrated. Now, on returning to their homeland, they are facing unexpected challenges.

Reintegration after exile

Ali's mother says she tries to help her son read and write in Arabic, "but he needs special programmes and psychological support." She fears that, "the frustration that children like my Ali experience may eventually lead to a rejection of education itself."

So how should the Syrian state deal with these young people who, while Syrian, have spent large parts of their lives abroad?

Ali's mother says that schools appear to be overwhelmed by the task of re-integrating children into the Syrian school system. She sees a need for specialised centres to support returning children: "They don't have the resources to take into account the individual differences between students." 

It's a problem with which Jumana al-Yasser is also familiar. After 10 years in exile, she returned to Syria from Lebanon with her nine-year-old son. His classmates make fun of him because of his limited Arabic.

The Syrian school curriculum is completely different to that of Lebanon where many subjects are taught in English or French, rather than Arabic. "My son is insecure," says Jumana al-Yasser. "And he receives neither psychological support nor specialised Arabic lessons."

No contact with Modern Standard Arabic

In the schools themselves, that sense of being overwhelmed is often palpable. "I meet students who can't read a simple sentence in Arabic, even though they understand the language," says Ahmad al-Saadi, a teacher at a school in the Damascus suburbs. "Some write letters backwards, others confuse the grammatical rules of Arabic with those of other languages." These are not isolated cases, he adds.

While most Syrian children in exile continued to speak Arabic in a Syrian dialect in the family home, they had little exposure to Modern Standard Arabic, which they now need for school. There is a big difference between the many Arabic dialects, which vary from country to country, and Standard Arabic. 

If the students returning to Syria have been living in Europe or Turkey, they are often unfamiliar with the Arabic alphabet. "This leads to a large educational gap between them and their peers. It puts us teachers in a situation for which we are not trained," says al-Saadi.

Some schools, he allows, are trying to find solutions such as organising tutoring sessions for the newcomers. "But we lack a clear methodology and institutional support."

Call for integration classes

For Al-Saadi, it is imperative that the Syrian government sets up special programs for the reintegration of returning children and trains teachers how to teach Arabic as a foreign language. "We also need specialists to provide psychological and educational support.

"If children feel that they are always lagging behind, they lose motivation," he points out. 

For education expert Khaled Abbas, this change in teaching language, in combination with the loss of a familiar educational environment, results in a "double shock" which affects the children's confidence. "A child who has performed excellently at school abroad suddenly realises that they are unable to read a single paragraph in Arabic. That leaves psychological scars."

Like Al-Saadi, Abbas is critical of the lack of organised support and resources, pointing out that few schools in Syria have staff trained to teach Arabic as a second language. "We need a comprehensive approach from preparing teachers to setting up small integration classes to ongoing support programs."

Abbas even points to a potential security threat, given the increased likelihood that some children will drop out of school altogether; "and then perhaps slip through the cracks into criminal activity."

What is the Syrian state doing?

Anecdotal evidence suggests that early intervention and targeted support can make a big difference. Abbas describes how one fourth grader returned to Syria from Germany: "He was very advanced in his previous school, but here he couldn't even write his name correctly in Arabic. At first, the child refused to attend classes, but after receiving individual tutoring, he regained his confidence." 

As of yet, the government in Syria has made little effort to address the problem of re-integration; there are other, larger, problems, such as rebuilding schools destroyed or damaged in the war. According to Enab Baladi, some 40 percent of all school buildings in Syria were affected. In addition, both qualified teachers and the money to pay them are in short supply.

The Ministry of Education is currently considering introducing remedial classes, but for children such as 11-year-old Ali that help can't come quickly enough: "At my school in Germany, I was confident, but here I feel like I'm falling behind," he says. Sometimes Ali refuses to go to school in the morning; until now, at least, his family has been able to persuade him to change his mind. 

This text is an edited translation of the original Arabic. Translated from German by Louise East.