Book Review: Investment in Second Language Learning and Higher Education: Narratives of Syrian Refugees in Turkish Universities

Onur Özkaynak,  The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA

The first groups fleeing the Syrian civil war arrived in Türkiye in 2011. They included people of all ages, like young adults whose education was abruptly interrupted. Although Türkiye was unprepared for a large influx of refugees, it welcomed Syrians and, for years, was described by UNHCR as the world’s largest refugee-hosting country (UNHCR, 2025). This mass displacement often draws attention for its numbers and policies, but the educational experiences of Syrian young adults have remained comparatively overlooked. Hauber-Özer’s book, Investment in Second Language Learning and Higher Education: Narratives of Syrian Refugees in Turkish Universities, is important because it focuses on the experiences of Syrian young adults. It examines how they continue to invest in language learning and higher education while facing challenging conditions. In doing so, it offers a necessary corrective to deficit-oriented accounts of refugee learners and insists on seeing them instead as agentive and future-oriented subjects.

One of the book’s key strengths is its conceptual framework. Drawing on critical perspectives on language, power, and identity (Pennycook, 2021), sociocultural views of language learning (Vygotsky, 1978), and Norton’s concept of investment (Norton, 2013), Hauber-Özer argues that language learning cannot be understood solely as a matter of individual motivation. Instead, she claims investment is influenced by power, access, recognition, and future aspirations. This perspective helps us understand refugee students in Türkiye, whose educational paths are affected by several factors such as legal challenges, unequal access to education, racism, financial struggles, and the demands of learning Turkish. The book goes beyond simply telling stories of learning Turkish; it also explores how language, identity, and social opportunity are connected during forced displacement.

Methodologically, the book is strong as well. Hauber-Özer employs what she calls “advocacy ethnography,” and she blends it with critical ethnography and narrative inquiry to focus on refugee students’ own insights. This approach challenges the dehumanizing tendencies often found in refugee research (Smith, 2021). In addition to using interviews, questionnaires, photovoice, and narrative portraits, the study offers participants multilingual access through Arabic and Turkish and anticipates translanguaging as part of meaning-making. It also builds in forms of collaboration and reciprocity through Samar’s role in piloting and translating the interview protocol, supporting transcription and analysis, and later co-presenting findings. Although the book does not report formal member checking, and data collection was constrained by the shift to online interviewing during COVID-19, it still offers a reflexive and relatively non-extractive model for future research with displaced students.

The book’s empirical contributions are also significant. Throughout the chapters, readers see how interrupted education, informational barriers, difficulties navigating higher education procedures and expectations, language barriers, financial hardship, and racism shape students’ paths to and through university. Hauber-Özer avoids the usual humanitarian narratives that depict refugees solely as vulnerable individuals. Instead, she highlights the strategies these students employ, such as determination, self-belief, acceptance of differences, faith, support from family, peer networks, scholarships, and dedicated time and effort. She does not romanticize them as heroes nor portray them as mere victims. Instead, in Hauber-Özer’s account, refugees navigate deeply unequal conditions with intelligence, discipline, and care, even when institutions fall short in supporting them.

Another major strength of the book is its treatment of integration. According to Hauber-Özer, integration is often understood as the social and economic incorporation of refugees into the host society, but this concept remains conceptually unclear and does not fully capture the realities of asylum contexts such as Türkiye, where Syrians lived under temporary protection and were, for years, actively discouraged from integrating. Instead of treating adaptation as a linear movement toward stable national incorporation, Hauber-Özer places greater emphasis on belonging, identity, and imagined futures. In her account, participants’ aspirations are diverse and sometimes ambivalent: some seek belonging in Türkiye, others imagine onward migration, and some see mobility itself as part of who they are becoming. This is precisely what gives the book conceptual depth. It refuses the assumption that successful adaptation must culminate in fixed national attachment and instead shows how refugee students imagine futures shaped by dignity, autonomy, mobility, and meaningful work.

The book also offers important practical insights. Its policy and pedagogical implications are clear and persuasive, especially for Syrian young adults living under temporary protection who have already gained access to Turkish universities. Hauber-Özer points to the shortcomings of scholarship schemes that overlook family responsibilities, the need for earlier and more meaningful exposure to Turkish, and the limitations of teacher-centered language instruction that does not prepare students for the social and academic demands of university life. Particularly compelling is her argument that language support should extend beyond formal access to include communicative practice, academic discourse, translanguaging possibilities, and faculty preparedness. The book’s emphasis on asset-oriented teaching and anti-racist institutional training is especially valuable in a context where refugee students reported stereotyping, exclusion, and discrimination. At the same time, these implications are shaped by the study’s scope: it focuses on Syrian and Palestinian-from-Syria students already enrolled in higher education under temporary protection, rather than those who never reached university, left education earlier, or belonged to other refugee groups in Türkiye. In that sense, the book’s practical contributions are most directly relevant to improving the educational experiences of those who have already entered the system, while also pointing to the need for further research on those excluded before university access.

Overall, this book is insightful, compassionate, and theoretically grounded, with important implications for both research and practice. Its main contribution is that it shifts the conversation about refugee students in higher education away from deficit and toward struggle, agency, and unequal opportunity. Hauber-Özer shows that language learning, university access, and future-making are deeply tied to recognition, power, and belonging. For TESOL practitioners, one of the book’s most important reminders is that language support cannot stop at grammar instruction or formal access to preparatory classes. Refugee students need opportunities to develop academic language, oral confidence, and meaningful participation through more equitable, asset-oriented, and anti-racist forms of pedagogy, as well as support structures such as mentorship, conversation spaces, and orientation programs. For researchers in applied linguistics, migration, and education, this book offers valuable empirical insight as well as an ethical reminder: if we want to understand refugee learners, we must take their voices, aspirations, and interpretive frameworks seriously. A promising place to begin is to conduct research with refugees rather than merely on or about them, which Hauber-Özer’s book demonstrates with considerable care.

Onur Özkaynak, Ph.D., is an applied linguist specializing in multilingual language education, educational sociolinguistics, and critical approaches to language teaching. His research focuses on language ideologies, including accentism, native-speakerism, and the global spread of English from a decolonial perspective.

References

Norton, B. (2013). Identity and language learning: Extending the conversation. Multilingual Matters.

Pennycook, A. (2021). Critical Applied Linguistics: A critical re-introduction (2nd ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003090571

Smith, L. T. (2021). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples (3rd ed.). Zed Books.

UNHCR. (2025, August 5). Republic of Türkiye. UNHCR. https://www.unhcr.org/where-we-work/countries/republic-tuerkiye

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press.