Informed by socio-cultural theories of learning (Vygotsky, 1986) and predicated upon the need to include contextual and socio-cultural factors in language acquisition research (Firth & Wagner, 1997; Norton, 2000, 2013), project SOFRA investigates how Syrian asylum seekers learning French in France interface with French as a new national language. 36 participants were recruited in the Occitanie region for a longitudinal study taking place a little over 8 months, contributing sociocultural and linguistic data consisting of narrative/story retellings in both French L2 and Syrian Arabic L1, unscripted opinion speeches in both languages, a bilingual semi-directed interview, a language test, and a short questionnaire about personal values (PVQ). A subset of participants (N=10) also contributed some written material in the form of journal entries during voluntary sessions where they had access to individualized support to develop their writing skills. Project SOFRA established a complex, multidisciplinary protocol to investigate learning trends in an understudied population (van Tubergen, 2010; Véronique, 2021). The resulting corpus can be useful to further research in second language acquisition research through a socio-cultural lens.