An Approach to Integrate Emotional Education into the Foreign Language Classroom

Abstract

Psychological and mental illnesses such as depression affect every year a larger amount of people, warning the World Health Organization (WHO) that during the following years they will become the type of disease that affects a larger number of individuals. Specifically, teenagers represent one of the main risk groups and are probably the ones more susceptible to suffer this kind of distress. However, the Secondary Education centers in Spain continue to ignore this fact and do not offer their students a psychological and emotional formation that allows them to avoid this type of diseases or a real support to overcome them. Indeed, the effects of this situation are observable both in the personal an in the academic field, what arises the need of incorporating to our Compulsory Secondary Education classrooms a set of tools that foster the students’ emotional and psychological education. Focusing this topic on the field of foreign language teaching, surveys such as the Eurobarometer and the Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (CIS) barometer point out that the Spanish are at the bottom of European ranking in terms of English proficiency level. In fact, the reasons behind this poor performance have both a psychological origin – lack of motivation and confidence – and a methodological origin, as a significant part of our teachers continue to utilize obsolete and ineffective methods when teaching a foreign language. Therefore, it is required an approach that fosters not only the students’ emotional education, but also a better and more effective acquisition of the foreign language. Bearing this in mind, the objective of this dissertation is the creation a methodological approach that allows the natural acquisition of the English language and that also cultivates the pupils’ emotional intelligence and takes care of their mental health.