61 T H E E U R O P E A N J O U R N A L OF A P P L I E D L I N G U I S T I C S A N D T E F L 4 REFUGEE YOUTH, DIGITAL STORYTELLING AND ACADEMIC CONFIDENCE Toby Emert, Agnes Scott College, USA ABSTRACT Over half of the world’s refugees are under the age of 18, and most have had their formal education interrupted, so their learning needs, once they enrol in schools in an adopted country, are significant. Developing literacy in a new language is often daunting and elusive, and refugee-background learners typically struggle. This article details an action research project that investigated the experiences of a selected group of middle school girls, all the children of refugee families, who engaged in a series of dovetailed literacy lessons focused on digital storytelling. In weekly co-curricular sessions, the 14 students who participated in the project worked alongside a college professor and eight college women to practise a range of language and literacy skills as they told autobiographical stories, and then translated those stories to film, using simple movie-making software KEYWORDS: refugee youth, digital storytelling, multiliteracies, arts-based pedagogies 1. INTRODUCTION All immigration narratives are inherently laced with drama, as people do not “leave the countries of their birth without ... compelling reasons” (Vaynshtok, 2001, p. 26). Refugee stories, however, typically depict desperate circumstances that force victims of political conflict, ethnic discord and sectarian violence to flee their homelands. Most internally displaced persons (IDPs) – the term used by the United Nations (UN) to describe forced migrants – hope to be able to return to their lives, but if they have a founded fear of ongoing persecution in their home countries, the UN grants them refugee status. The “refugee” designation allows individuals and families to request asylum in one of the countries that, in partnership with the UN, has a formal relocation programme. The statistics, however, are dire. Barely 1 per cent of asylum seekers are ultimately successful in immigrating to a host country. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), established after World War II to safeguard the rights and well-being of refugees, reports that over half of the world’s refugees are under the age of 18. Over the last four decades, millions of refugees have migrated to the United States, which has traditionally resettled more of the world’s refugees than all other asylum-granting countries combined. Recent statistics suggest that