ABSTRACT
After the end of the U.S. war in Vietnam and into the early 1980s, hundreds of thousands of Southeast Asian refugees immigrated to North America and flooded resettlement camps in places such as the Philippines (Auerbach & Burgess, 1985) in the “largest refugee resettlement program in U.S. history” (Tollefson, 1989, p. x). Most of the publications related to L2 Adult Basic Education in the early 1980s consisted of either quantitative studies of large populations or curriculum-related materials focused on teaching “survival English” in response to this influx and in an effort to quickly get L2 learners ready for lives in English. By the mid-1980s the English language programs developed in the US and in refugee resettlement programs began to draw serious criticism for their adoption of then current communicative, competency-based language teaching methodologies. These survival English curriculums purported to teach the amount and type of practical English actually needed and used in daily tasks to allow refugees and other immigrants to learn enough basic English to get a job. Analyses of these programs (particularly by Auerbach & Burgess, 1985, and Tollefson, 1986, 1989), heavily influenced by Freirian critiques of these types of materials as reflective of banking models of education (Freire, 1970), argued persuasively that they trained and led refugees and immigrants to expect to remain at the lowest socioeconomic levels, regardless of their previous education and experience. Auerbach and Burgess (1985, p. 484) cited an excerpt from materials at the time intended to wryly capture the essence of the employment conflict for many newcomers:
14. A. What did you do in Laos? B. I taught college for 15 years. I was Deputy Minister of
Education for ten years and then . . . A. I see. Can you cook Chinese food?
