Developing Students’ Emotional Competencies in English Language Classes: Reciprocal Benefits and Practical Implications

Abstract

Learning a foreign language involves a wide range of cognitive, social and affective skills. The present article gives ideas to develop socio-emotional competencies in English courses: the capac-ity to identify the emotion, to understand the causes and consequences, to express their emotions and to do so in a socially acceptable manner, to manage stress and to use their emotions to in-crease the effectiveness of thinking, decision making and actions. Content and language integrated learning (CLIL) is a dual approach aiming to develop both language and academic subject knowledge. It may be gradually introduced, embedding it at three levels: into the classroom (rou-tines, organization, pupils’ behavior), the school and the curriculum. Successful learning in CLIL remains based on (1) communication, (2) ways of engaging in the learning process and (3) the use of meaning-making strategies. We propose a pedagogical sequence (several courses) to learn a second language based on the social and emotional learning approach, and the English course-book MORE! 7e for primary school pupils (aged 10–11). We combine the specific language learn-ing of the unit—talking about ourselves, people and their feelings—with the development of pu-pils’ basic emotional competencies, and discuss advantages and disadvantages to consider in order to successfully implement such lessons.