Emotions Helping Students to Communicate

The Success of an English Lesson

The success of an English lesson will lay on how meaningful it is for the students. This fact has led teachers all around the world to create different ways to catch students’ interests so they can achieve the communicative skills in English. There are different ways in which these motivational practices can be done.

On my own experience, I have tried by using music, literature and art. Using one of these three at the time or one by one I have experienced how they all provoke different emotions on every single student and the whole group. Music, literature and art deal with emotions encode in the written, oral and symbolic language that evoke similar emotions on the person. Emotions come before the language and it is the language that translates emotions into written or oral discourses. When a student or a whole class have experience the connection between the art input and their own life facts they are ready to communicate and share what they feel and consider.

The moment after that connection and the willingness to communicate that students show is what we need to lead them towards the management of all English skills in the same way will develop emotional and cultural awareness, deep refection processes and a plethora of background knowledge.

In order to take advance of that specific moment we need first to produce it. Generating meaningful lessons by using music, literature and art and all their implications we need preparation, reflection about the objectives we want to accomplish and willingness to make a difference and the students' world view. Further reflections, demonstrations and sample lessons will be available soon.

By Diego Navarro Petit.

Emotions Helping Students to Communicate by Diego Navarro Petit is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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