Do you dare to feel? The Use of SEL through Arts in the EFL Classroom

Abstract

[eng] In the last few years, the term social-emotional learning (SEL) has become more and more relevant in the educational field. Research has shown (Niemi, 2020) that today’s teenagers are suffering from mental health issues more than ever before, and so it does not come as a surprise that there is a growing interest for the topic among the educational community. Moreover, the need of socialemotional learning has also been expressed by students (DePaoli et al., 2018) and therefore can no longer be ignored. The purpose of this dissertation is to demonstrate how SEL can help students to better understand their emotions and their relationships with others, as well as improve their English communicative skills. The aim of using SEL as a tool in the EFL classroom is to provide students with the necessary vocabulary and communicative skills as well as to further develop their emotional intelligence, as there is evidence that some of them find self-expression more attractive in a foreign language. In this sense, using arts as the driver for such discussion is a natural choice as art is a very powerful form of self-expression. All these will be explored in the theoretical framework, and then supported by the practical framework, where a didactic unit to work on students’ social-emotional learning through arts is proposed. Such unit, Do you dare to feel?, consists of six lessons focusing on emotions and feelings through poetry, music, fiction, visual arts and drama.