Teaching communication at lessons of English through building sel (social and emotional learning) skills

Размещено на http://www.allbest.ru/

Teaching communication at lessons of English through building sel (social and emotional learning) skills

Olena Iaburova

Candidate of Pedagogical Sciences, Associate Professor of Primary Education Theory and Practice Department SHEI “Donbas State Pedagogical University”

Sloviansk, Donetsk region, Ukraine

Abstract

Teaching communication at lessons of English is a vital part of effective lessons of English. Productive communication includes attentive and appreciative listening, clear selfexpression as well as main language competences. By practicing communicative skills, students gain a wide range of social skills which are an integral part of expressing opinions, justifying, negotiations, debating, agreeing and disagreeing, making analysis and generalization.

The purpose of the article is to generalize foreign strategies in the frame of SEL that gives an opportunity to improve students' academic outcomes, graduation rates and test scores, makes it easier for students to develop their emotional intelligence, become team-oriented and enhance their leadership skills. The core principles of SEL (Social and Emotional Learning) constitute the practical strategies of teaching communication at the lessons of English though building SEL skills. The author analyzes foreign experience about the impact of enhancing students' social and emotional learning, effectiveness of school-based universal, social, emotional and behavioral programs, promoting positive youth development through emotional learning interventions in the scientific works of J.A. Durlak.

The author defines core factors which are an integral part of SEL implementation, describes a variety of approaches, key elements and strategies which influence students' communicative skills, eagerness to become active participants of cooperative learning. The author underlines the fact that obtaining emotional vocabulary at lessons of English is essential for both receptive and productive skills of modern students. The ability to differentiate speakers' emotions, voice tunes, interrogative and negative intonation, reference to the previous events or future perspectives is the skill to be developed by using SEL techniques. One of the strategies, the author describes in the article, is using Emotional and Scenario Cards in the frame of SEL which can be integrated into the process of teaching English aimed at improving students' communicative skills.

Key words: self-awareness; communication competence; self-management; relationship skills; SEL; emotional vocabulary.

НАВЧАННЯ КОМУНІКАЦІЇ НА УРОКАХ АНГЛІЙСЬКОЇ ЧЕРЕЗ ФОРМУВАННЯ НАВИЧОК SEL (СОЦІАЛЬНОГО ТА ЕМОЦІОНАЛЬНОГО НАВЧАННЯ)

Олена Ябурова

кандидат педагогічних наук, доцент

кафедри теорії та практики початкової освіти

ДВНЗ «Донбаський державний педагогічний університет»

м. Слов'янськ, Донецька область, Україна

Анотація. Навчання спілкуванню на уроках англійської мови є важливою частиною ефективних уроків англійської мови. Продуктивне спілкування включає уважне та вдячне слухання, чітке самовираження, а також основні мовні навички. Практикуючи комунікативні навички, учні здобувають широкий спектр соціальних навичок, які є невід'ємною частиною висловлення думок, обґрунтування, переговорів, дискусій, згоди та не згоди, аналізу та узагальнення. emotional learning sel student

Метою статті є узагальнення зарубіжних стратегій у рамках SEL, що дає можливість покращити навчальні результати учнів, випускні бали та тестові показники, полегшує розвиток емоційного інтелекту учнів, орієнтованість на команду та підвищення рівня їх лідерських здібностей. Основні принципи SEL (Соціальне та емоційне навчання) складають практичні стратегії викладання спілкування на уроках англійської мови, хоча і формують навички SEL. Автор аналізує зарубіжний досвід щодо впливу на підвищення рівня соціального та емоційного навчання учнів, ефективності загальноосвітніх, соціальних, емоційних та поведінкових програм на базі школи, сприяння позитивному розвитку молоді завдяки емоційному навчальному втручанню у наукових працях Ж. А. Дурлака.

Автор визначає основні фактори, які є невід'ємною частиною впровадження SEL, описує різноманітні підходи, ключові елементи та стратегії, які впливають на комунікативні навички учнів, прагнення стати активними учасниками спільного навчання. Автор підкреслює той факт, що здобуття емоційної лексики на уроках англійської мови має важливе значення як для сприйнятливих, так і продуктивних навичок сучасних учнів. Здатність диференціювати емоції мовців, голоси, питальні та негативні інтонації, посилання на попередні події чи майбутні перспективи - це вміння розвиватися за допомогою методів SEL. Однією із стратегій, описаної автором у статті, є використання картки емоцій та сценаріїв у рамках SEL, які можуть бути інтегровані в процес викладання англійської мови, спрямований на вдосконалення комунікативних навичок учнів.

Ключові слова: самосвідомість; комунікативна компетентність; самоуправління; навички відносин; SEL; емоційна лексика.

Statement of the problem in general

Communication is an integral part of effective collaborative lessons of English. It is vital to presenting lesson material, organizing meaningful discussions, giving students feedback and reflection, involving the class in group or face-to-face interaction. Productive communication includes not only using grammar rules, spelling patterns and vocabulary sets in a correct way, but also listening attentively and appreciatively, promoting clear self-expression, integrating life-skill-building into the content classroom and honoring differences. By practicing communication skills, students obtain knowledge of key factors in building interpersonal relationships, recognizing non-verbal clues, keeping educative surroundings safe and functioning in an open manner. Effective communication is also essential in expressing their learning goals, developing their social skills and confidence in understanding their educational aims and future prospects.

Building SEL (Social and Emotional Learning) skills is the process of obtaining knowledge through which all the participants are involved in understanding and sharing emotions, setting positive goals and achieving them through hard work and determination. Students learn how to feel in a good way and show empathy and tolerance for others, establish and maintain positive relationships and make a responsible decision while learning English. SEL enhances students' capacity to ingrate their social skills, attitudes to their families, school surrounding and community, behavioral patterns which help to cope with everyday tasks and more global ambitions and challenges in the process of learning. Like many other frameworks, social and emotional learning promotes intrapersonal, interpersonal and cognitive competences that benefit develo ping students' skills in speaking English.

Analyzing the latest research and publications

The largest and most well- known study about the impact of social-emotional learning on academic learning in formal SEL research was done by J. A. Durlak (2011). The result from his studies of schools following SEL programs has showed that students participating in SEL demonstrate more improved social-emotional skills, positively-oriented social behavior, strengthened academic achievements, openness and readiness for communication.

C. K. Jackson (2018) looked at the issue of formal SEL training more broadly and highlighted the impact of student-teacher interaction on developing students' communicative skills and the value of moving beyond an intrapersonal focus on traditional academic instruction.

Exploring long-term effects of SEL on students from kindergarten through highschool experienced SEL teaching, R. Taylor, E. Oberle, J. A. Dulark (2017) prove that students involved in school-based universal programs are observed to demonstrate stronger social-emotional skills and attitudes, more positive social behavioral patterns, greater academic success in comparison with peers without SEL exposure. According to the research, SEL programs were protective factors against later communication isolation, behaviour problems, emotional distress, and mutual understanding. M. Wenz-Gross, M. Yoo, C. C. Upshur and A. J. Ganbino (2018), associate SEL for early learning with many positive outcomes, such as improvement in prosocial and

social-emotional skills, emotional management and problem solving, increasing executive-function skills. According to the research, SEL effective strategies provide students with skills that promote their well-being, future career prospects, and communicative benefits.

Conceptualizing basic approaches to SEL, R. Weissberg (2015), has identified a set of five main groups of social and emotional competences: self-awareness, selfmanagement, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision makin g. These competences, as M. J. Elias (2014) points out, are thought to facilitate students' academic performance, reduce psychological distress and help to prepare young people to succeed in college, work, family, and society.

The aim of the research is to underline the necessity of implementing SEL (Social and Emotional Learning) strategies into the process of teaching English as the means of enhancing their communicative skills.

The results of the study

Learning communication in a foreign language is a complicated and multi-levelled process which involves both learning language competences (vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation) and a set of personal competences such as social, intercultural, communicative and other ones. Many educators and researchers have explored that forming right social and emotional learning competences contribute to developing stable and advanced speaking skills. In the text of the annual conference “Partnership for 21st Century Skills” it is pointed out that today's life and work environments require far more than thinking skills and content knowledge. The ability to navigate the complex life and work environments in the globally competitive information age also requires students to pay rigorous attention to developing adequate life and career skills, such as Flexibility and Adaptability; Initiative and Self-Direction; Social and Cross-Cultural Skills; Productivity and Accountability; and Leadership and Responsibility (Partnership for 21st Century Learning, 2006).

The result of the research on the correlation between speaking skills and social competences based on the scientific works of prominent scientists in this sphere (R. Taylor, E. Oberle, J. A. Durlak, & R. P. Weissberg (2017); M. Skiad, R. Diekstera, M. De Ritter, J. Ben, & C. Gravestejin (2012); J. L. Mahoney, J. A. Durlak, & R. P. Weissberg (2018)), has allowed to define core factors which are the integral part of expressing opinions, justifying, negotiating, debating, agreeing and disagreeing, making analysis and generalizing. These factors are presented in the table given below.

Table 1

Social and emotional development can be fostered by using a variety of approaches of students which influence their communicative skills, eagerness to become active participants of cooperative learning, share their ideas in a free and open manner can:

- free-structured lesson focused on emotional competence explicitly;

- teaching practices such as cooperative learning, teamwork, and projectbased learning to promote SEL;

- integration of SEL as a part of a school course;

- schoolwide initiative to create a climate and culture conducive to learning.

Effective implementation of these approaches is based on four key elements which should be integral ones for every SEL practice:

- all activities sequenced, connected and coordinated to monitor skills development;

- active forms of learning prevail as being engaging and involving ones they master new skills and attitudes;

- components focused on developing and social skills are included in the scenario of every lesson;

- targeting specific social and emotional skills is explicit, and registered by commenting, discussing, result predicting and stage ticking.

SEL as every teaching method known has its own strategies described, implemented and accessed by many researchers and educators. They include the following ones:

- Students are taught through modelling and coaching to recognize how they feel towards real-life events, school, collisions, everyday situation (creating survey, emotional chants, feeling diagrams, agreeing/ disagreeing tables).

- The use of a conflict-resolution skill and dialoging to guide students through the stages of an interpersonal role-play is an effective approach to applying a skill and obtaining an emotion-respond in a new situation (character role playing cards, conflictsoloing discussions, panels of judges, negotiations, for/against meetings).

- Students practise relevant decision-making and setting rules by participating in a fixed or one-task group making (expert-games, no-right decision discussion, fun group meeting, subscribers' charts, generation view panels).

- Extra-curriculum activities like team-sports, board-games, brain-storms learn students' cooperation and interaction (moving games, city quests, races, ice - breakers, emo-trainings).

- Current social or political events or historical background are analyzed through a set of questions based on problem-solving models (debating teams, counsellor session, brain-rings, reality TV programs).

- Cross-age mentoring is effective in building self-confidence, a sense of belonging, sharing mutual goals, enhancing academic skills.

- Teaching reflective listening contributes to forming positive social surrounding (“Am I a good listener?” game, mirror -reflection training, rope-ideas practice).

The point of obtaining emotional vocabulary is essential for both receptive and productive skills of modern students. Upper-Intermediate and Advanced levels tasks require students to deepen more into the content of complex texts. Comprehensive tasks of “reading” and “listening” have additional challenges in clear understanding of the vocabulary, which is not simply caught from the context (as it normally happens at elementary and intermediate levels) but has slight difference in emotional colouring. The ability to differentiate the voice of the speakers, their rising or falling tunes, interrogative or negative intonation, reference to the previous events or future perspectives is the skill to be developed by using SEL techniques. Writing reflective tasks that include personal feeling and opinions about what students have read or heard also depend on the richness of students' emotional vocabulary which contributes to expressing students' ideas fully and without high constraint.

Emotional vocabulary is important in all language competences: reading, writing, listening and speaking. Vocabulary does not simply give the word definition but participate in complex constructing that is necessary to succeed in understanding increasingly multilayered reality. Students writing about emotion recognition and emotion awareness restrict the depth of their work meaning by simplifying the emotions they express limiting them with primary labelled emotion vocabulary. Such simplification blocks the nuances in relationships and situations for understanding that is important for their clear and successful navigating.

Another aspect of emotional vocabulary significance is a students' capacity to think and act constructively. The range of the emotions is not fixed and balances between being “mad” to much more limited emotional states such as “frustrated”, “puzzled”, “annoyed” or even “put down”, all of which are alternative and labels to define the situation “to be mad”.

There are many behavioral implications of this differentiation in and out of the classroom that influence both students' perceiving and producing emotions. That leads to the fact that the skill area of emotional vocabulary is such a strong focus of learning material for promoting social-emotional learning.

In the process of training teachers of English should take steps to build their students' emotion vocabulary and accomplish this task both formally and informally.

1. When students are having difficulty, ask them for several ways to describe how they are feeling.

2. When students have disagreements, ask them about the other students' feelings and how they could tell how they were feeling.

3. Assign new emotion words for children to use explicitly in writing assignments.

4. Encourage students to widen their emotional reflection when they are doing reflective writing or journaling.

5. When reading or watching videos, pay particular attention to how authors and directors convey emotion, directly and indirectly, in words, pictures, gestures, settings, and sounds.

One of the strategies how to learn emotional vocabulary in the frame of SEL is Emotional and Scenario Cards. Integrating the cards into the process of teaching aimed at improving students' communicative skills can be described in the following direction:

1. Use the cards in a receptive matching game, in a role-play guessing game, in discussions to enhance perspective-taking skills.

2. Print out appropriate number of copies based on your class size.

3. Cut out emotion word cards and scenario cards.

4. Determine the appropriate emotion field with an emotion scenario. Remember that some scenarios may match more than one emotion! Use the Emotions Word Bank to write in additional emotions on blank cards. Increase the member of emotions and scenarios when your students demonstrate increased independence (Fig. 1).

5. Play role-games with emotion cards (unexpected meeting interview, real -life situations). Take photos and create emotion cards. Show them to your students and ask to describe emotion state of the person (Fig. 2). Put the pictures on the card in the line from weak to strong ones. Make up short emotion descriptions or even stories (Fig. 3).

6. Put the Story cards on the table in front of students. Let them choose the set of cards they want to base their story on and listen to group or individual story presentation.

Fig.1 Social and Emotional Scenario

Fig.2 Descriptive cards with emotions

Fig.3 Story-picture cards

The conclusions and the perspectives of further research

The analysis of foreign experience of teaching communication through building SEL (Social and Emotional Learning) skills makes it possible to understand the main approaches to assessing learners' needs as for correlation between speaking skills and social competences and defining core factors which are integral part of expressing opinions, marking analysis, generalization, negotiations, debating, agreeing and disagreeing. Social and emotional development of students which fosters their communicative competence through teaching them emotional vocabulary can be enhanced by implementing SEL strategies into practice.

SEL research and implementation continues to evolve and indicates that social and emotional learning provide students with skills that both promote their communicate skills which contribute to their future career and life prospects and wellbeing which protect against negative outcomes. Although SEL is not one possible approach to improve students' communicative skills, it is an effective strategy to develop their self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making. While teaching communicative skills at the lessons of English, SEL improves academic outcomes, graduation rates and test scores, makes it easier for students to become team-oriented, develop as much emotional intelligence as possible and enhance students' leadership such as authenticity, empathy and the skills to self-manage emotions.

REFERENCES

1. Durlak, J. A., Weissberg, R. P., Dymnicki, A. B., Taylor, R. D. & Schellinger, K. B. (2011). The impact of enhancing students' social and emotional learning: A meta-analysis of schoolbased universal interventions. Child Development, 82, 405-432.

2. Elias, M. J. (2014). Social-emotional skills can boost Common Core implementation. Phi Delta Kappan, 96(3), 58-62.

3. Mahoney, J. L., Durlak, J. A., & Weissberg, R. P. (2018). An update on social and emotional learning outcome research. Phi Delta Kappan, 100(4), 18-23.

4. Sklad, M., Diekstra, R., De Ritter, M., Ben, J., & Gravesteijn, C. (2012). Effectiveness of school-based universal social, emotional, and behavioral programs. Do they enhance students' development in the area of skill, behavior, and adjustment? Psychology and Schools, 49, 892-909.

5. Jackson, C. K. (2018). What do test scores miss? The importance of teacher effects on non-test score outcomes. Journal of Political Economy, 126(5), 2072-2107.

6. Taylor, R., Oberle, E., Durlak, J. A., & Weissberg, R. P. (2017). Promoting positive youth development through school-based social and emotional learning interventions: A metaanalysis of follow-up effects. Child Development, 88, 1156-1171.

7. Weissberg, R. P., Durlak, J. A., Domitrovich, C. E., & Gullotta, T. P. (2015). Social and emotional learning: Past, present, and future. In J. A. Durlak, C. E. Domitrovich, R. P. Weissberg, & T. P. Gullotta (eds.), Handbook of social and emotional learning: Research and practice (pp. 3-19). New York, NY: Guilford Press.

8. Wenz-Gross, M., Yoo, Y., Upshur, C. C., & Gambino, A. J. (2018). Pathways to kindergarten readiness: The roles of Second Step Early Learning curriculum and social emotional, executive functioning, preschool academic and task behavior skills. Frontiers in Psychology (9).

9. Results That Matter: 21st Century Skills and High School Reform - This March 2006 report from The Partnership for 21st Century Skills presents three fundamental ideas about high school reform. Retrieved from http://www.nea.org/home/34888.htm

СПИСОК ВИКОРИСТАНИХ ДЖЕРЕЛ

1. Durlak, J. A., Weissberg, R. P., Dymnicki, A. B., Taylor, R. D. & Schellinger, K. B. (2011). The impact of enhancing students' social and emotional learning: A meta-analysis of schoolbased universal interventions. Child Development, 82, 405-432.

2. Elias, M. J. (2014). Social-emotional skills can boost Common Core implementation. Phi Delta Kappan, 96(3), 58-62.

3. Mahoney, J. L., Durlak, J. A., & Weissberg, R. P. (2018). An update on social and emotional learning outcome research. Phi Delta Kappan, 100(4), 18-23.

4. Sklad, M., Diekstra, R., De Ritter, M., Ben, J., & Gravesteijn, C. (2012). Effectiveness of school-based universal social, emotional, and behavioral programs. Do they enhance students' development in the area of skill, behavior, and adjustment? Psychology and Schools, 49, 892-909.

5. Jackson, C. K. (2018). What do test scores miss? The importance of teacher effects on non-test score outcomes. Journal of Political Economy, 126(5), 2072-2107.

6. Taylor, R., Oberle, E., Durlak, J. A., & Weissberg, R. P. (2017). Promoting positive youth development through school-based social and emotional learning interventions: A metaanalysis of follow-up effects. Child Development, 88, 1156-1171.

7. Weissberg, R. P., Durlak, J. A., Domitrovich, C. E., & Gullotta, T. P. (2015). Social and emotional learning: Past, present, and future. In J. A. Durlak, C. E. Domitrovich, R. P. Weissberg, & T. P. Gullotta (eds.), Handbook of social and emotional learning: Research and practice (pp. 3-19). New York, NY: Guilford Press.

8. Wenz-Gross, M., Yoo, Y., Upshur, C. C., & Gambino, A. J. (2018). Pathways to kindergarten readiness: The roles of Second Step Early Learning curriculum and social emotional, executive functioning, preschool academic and task behavior skills. Frontiers in Psychology (9).

9. Results That Matter: 21st Century Skills and High School Reform - This March 2006 report from The Partnership for 21st Century Skills presents three fundamental ideas about high school reform. Retrieved from http://www.nea.org/home/34888.htm

Размещено на Allbest.ru