Social and Emotional Learning: A Teaching Proposal for Integrating SEL into the EFL Subject

Abstract

[cat] The concepts of Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) and Emotional Intelligence (EI) have been recently introduced in the field of education. Being a new trend in the educational area, research has been done so as to analyse the effects of emotional education in the classroom. It is true that SEL plays an important role in the children’s development as a person, thus, fostering social and emotional skills in schools can benefit students both academically and in their everyday lives. Different articles and studies have been examined in order to establish the theoretical background of this work, based on the relationship between SEL and academic achievement, the presence of SEL in schools, and thus, the teacher training regarding SEL, concretely in the Balearic Islands, where the Curriculum for secondary education promotes that when finishing the compulsory stage of education, students have to be citizens of the real world. This citizenship will be accomplished by introducing competence learning in the classroom, and hence a new way of assessing. The teaching proposal hereinafter presented combines learning a foreign language (English) via SEL, thus escaping from the subjects that currently teach emotional education (Tutoring or Ethical Values). For the purpose of achieving this goal, different emotions or feelings have been chosen to be worked with. While working with a specific emotion, students will be also working with the English language. Different activities have been designed in order to help students develop their skills in the language, but also to help them understanding, managing, and expressing their emotions. All in all, the intention was to create an innovative, and at the same time, plausible proposal with the aim of applying it in the current education of the Balearic Islands.