- Helgesen JALT article 6:06 .pdf
- Article from 6/06 JALT Language Teacher
and positive
psychology
have to do with
teaching English?
They don’t have to go together. “Happiness” isn’t something like “vocabulary”, “grammar”, “listening/speaking/reading/writing” or other elements that are necessarily part of an ELT/EFL/ESL class. But a few points to consider:
• Every class involves educational psychology. As teachers, we are either doing this consciously or unconsciously. By embracing ideas from positive psychology, we can help to create a supportive environment for our learners and ourselves.
• For many English students, school is a test-oriented, “educational pressure cooker.” They are rarely told, “You’re going great.” Rather, they hear, “You can do better.” “Work harder.” While we all know that learning English can be hard work, we also know that students who experience success learn more. Some of these activities help learner feel successful.
• Most of this site is devoted to language learning/practice tasks. These are engaging activities. And that engagement leads to more motivation and more learning.
• We don’t just teach English. We teach people. Much of ELT and positive psychology is simple good, humanistic language teaching.
Positive psychology is a set of tools we can use as teachers -- and the more tools in our tool box, the better our work.
Actually, many of the activities on this website are not really such a big jump from what we already do. Think about the list of behaviors of happy people on the first page of the site. Many of the items are close to things we already do in our classes.
Many classes start each week with a quick “What did you do over the weekend?” warm-up. Instead, asking the students to “think of five good things from the past week” will generate the same kind of language (past simple, past continuous, etc.) but with a focus. In the same way, “noticing good things as they happen” is going to have students using the present simple.
Topics like “family” and “health” are standard in many English classes and textbooks. Things like “thanking” and “giving complements” (part of doing kind things) are important language functions.
So we are already doing many of these things. This website is a way to share ideas on how to do them in ways that make learners more aware of what they are doing. As they engage with the activities and with English, they are also engaging with each other – often while talking about things that are much deeper than the superficial “let’s talk about shopping/sports/food” topics that often take up class time.
And that engagement – with the language and with each other – leads to more learning.
The PDF on this page is a short article I wrote for JALT’s (Japan Association for Language Teaching) The Language Teacher. It introduces the ELT & Science of Happiness connection.
I hope you enjoy it.
