Europe recently experienced a dramatic influx of refugees. By the end of 2015, the European Union as a whole had received over 1.2 million first-time asylum claims (IOM, 2015). A small but significant sub-group of these people on the move are highly qualified professionals – doctors, architects, lawyers, teachers, engineers – who often find themselves in low-skilled, minimum-wage jobs for which they are over-qualified. Their skill sets and professional experience often count for little, as host countries in an alarming number of cases fail to utilise the potential of much sought-after qualified personnel. The integration of these highly skilled individuals into the labour market is crucial in order to avoid their long-term dependency and marginalization, and to create a positive image in the eyes of the public.Against this backdrop the ‘Critical Skills for Life and Work’ project (2017-2019), led by Newcastle University in the UK in partnership with the University of Graz in Austria, Fryske Academy in the Netherlands, and Action Foundation, a Newcastle-based refugee charity, sought to identify and articulate the profession-relevant communicative, interactional and intercultural needs of highly-skilled refugees, which would enable them to find employment in a professional domain for which they are qualified. The team’s ultimate aim was to design and implement effective training tools for enhancing the professional intercultural communicative competence (PICC) of highly skilled refugees and the language teachers who work with them. The four project partners worked with a group of 26 of highly skilled refugees and migrants, and with 15 teachers across the UK, Austria and the Netherlands to co-create a set of resources that can be useful in a diversity of European contexts. The result was an online toolkit for teachers and learners.The toolkit was developed as part of a two-stage collaborative process: In stage one (research stage) the team investigated in detail the lives and experiences of people who had successfully made the transition from refugee status back into the professional sphere. This was done through 15 ethnographic interviews (‘success stories’) which sought to discover exactly how these people had made the transition, what had helped them, what had hindered them, and what they could pass on to others like them by way of advice. Additionally, 21 focus groups were held with learners and teachers in the different locations, to gauge current provision and their needs in relation to developing PICC. Findings from this stage pointed to the importance of agency, resilience, self-motivation, as well as language and intercultural communication skills. In stage two (co-production), the team worked closely with local refugees and volunteer language teachers to develop learning and teaching materials. These were then piloted and trialled through a series of workshops and multiplier events with different target groups, including agencies working with skilled refugees, teaching organisations such as colleges of further and higher education, and relevant employers and employment agencies. The aim was to create a model which can be extended to other contexts. The main dissemination event was the project conference on 21st June 2019, which was attended by 100 people. The conference was also the official launch of the toolkit.The toolkit offers two modules: Module A: Teaching professional intercultural communicative competence (IO2: for teachers)Module B: Professional intercultural communicative competence for work and life (IO3: for learners)Both modules are available to download for free on the project website (http://cslw.eu/). Relevant sections of the toolkit have been translated and localised into German and Dutch.Each module consists of five parallel units: (1) context & background, (2) finding a job, (3) applying for a job, (4) being interviewed and, (5) starting a job. Each unit includes a set of activities designed for classroom use (for teachers) or for self-study (learners). All activities relate to the development of PICC. Supplementary materials and extension tasks are included at the end of each unit. The units are self-standing to allow teachers and learners to choose units and activities depending on their own specific needs and circumstances. From a linguistic perspective, the toolkit is built around the assumption that refugee and migrant professionals will have some linguistic capital. The primary aim of the toolkit is to develop PICC, as opposed to linguistic proficiency in any specific ‘target language’. Using all their plurilingual resources, learners might engage with input in one language and generate meaning in contextually appropriate ways.The toolkit has been and continues to be promoted through several activities: Conference presentations, the project website and social media activities, online posts and newsletters (for details see sections 6.3 and 6.2 below).

The Linguacuisine project has engaged and trained learners, including those who might be considered as marginalised, in the development of a digital platform incorporating a downloadable multimedia app (the Linguacuisine app) centred on cooking and languages. The ‘journey’ as well as the ‘destination’ stand out as key outcomes of this project.The project has provided opportunities for the creation of innovative and equalising learning experiences, including demystifying and diversifying the pool of ‘experts’ who can produce valuable learning content. Our goal was that the Linguacuisine experts would include the participants themselves and that their participation in co-design would validate their expertise in the culturally-linked issues of languages and cooking, while empowering them with valuable new digital skills. The project has brought learners together with experts in education, linguistics and digital technology to co-develop a digital platform to support task-based language learning through an online learning community.Through our nexus of good practice in task-based learning, digital learning, and language learning, we have created an innovative and engaging 'Learn as you Cook' mobile app. It has a web-based European language learning community using cooking in European languages and authoring capability as its unique selling point. This is a dedicated online community where users can create, share, and explore expert and citizen-generated learning content. Both the mobile app and the online community are freely available for download and designed for accessibility, supporting mass adoption of these learning materials with a focus on social inclusion.In this multi-sector project, the app was co-designed with a group of 40 digitally marginalized users with little or no digital experience, including migrants and refugees. We thereby ensured inclusivity in that the vast majority of EU citizens and migrants will be able to use the app and author a social recipe themselves. ‘Authoring’ here means a) writing an existing cooking recipe onto the system in short, simple stages using the authoring tool b) creating audio files for spoken instructions c) creating photos and videos together with subtitles as help facilities.The tablet/mobile apps developed in this project can speak to the users in 6 European languages, guide them through cooking a recipe, and offer multimedia help in terms of photos and videos. Users can access different levels of language learning help depending on their levels of competence. Transnational value was added by translating the app and we trialled social recipes in 6 languages in total. We have addressed the needs of European citizens, migrants and refugees by: improving basic skills, specifically digital competence; engaging digitally marginalized groups with technology; certifying and assessing digital competence; learning foreign languages, cultures and cuisines. The project has created a motivating way of learning digital skills and foreign languages, cultures and cuisines, making engaging technology available and accessible to a very wide audience. The project promotes active EU citizenship and promotes mobility within the EU by familiarizing people with other countries and cultures, engaging with the ‘Languages for social inclusion’ agenda, and by embracing the experiences and expertise of migrants and refugees as co-designers.