Trauma-informed pedagogy: reimagining language education for refugees and displaced learners

As global displacement continues to grow, language classrooms increasingly serve marginalised learners whose emotional and psychological needs are frequently overlooked by mainstream teacher education, curricula, and policies. To address this issue, this article proposes Critical Trauma-Informed Language Education (CTILE), a unified theoretical framework bridging sociopolitical critique with everyday classroom practice. CTILE integrates a structural lens of critical applied linguistics and language policy with a relational lens of trauma-informed pedagogy and social-emotional learning. Through a qualitative case study involving 14 Afghan refugee students and 12 Iranian EFL teachers, the research examines trauma’s profound impact on both cognitive and linguistic processing. It critiques neoliberal educational paradigms and competing language ideologies, contrasting exclusionary monolingual, standard-language, and human-capital orientations with inclusive multilingual, translanguaging, and pluralist approaches. Findings and their theoretical interpretation reveal how macro-level policies are experienced as heightening vulnerability and how trauma manifests in daily classroom interactions. However, the study also demonstrates that context-sensitive practices, such as strategic translanguaging, flexible participation, and narrative writing, can effectively foster psychological safety, learner agency, and cultural responsiveness. Ultimately, the article advocates for a paradigm shift from deficit-based models to humanising, inclusive approaches, positioning CTILE as an ethical imperative that honours the complex realities of displaced learners.