Effects of Emotional Literacy on Inferential Thinking - Coursework Example

The results will reveal noticeable increases in the student’s ability to identify and articulate emotions, infer similar emotions in characters and reflect metacognitively on both. It is expected that emotional literacy and metacognitive strategies will become embedded in the future curriculum in order to develop inferential thinking skills.Everyone experiences emotions. Emotions involve cognitive judgements and our cognition is shaped by our emotions. Conversely, little importance has been placed on explicitly teaching emotions in the foundational years.

As a result, students can be affected by their ability to pick up emotional nuance which can lead to misunderstood feelings, irrational choices and counterproductive actions. Picture storybooks also cannot be fully appreciated unless the character’s feelings are understood. Becoming emotionally literate takes time and while there are many tools to assist emotional development, it will be most successful when integrated with a systematic, curriculum-based program that is addressed yearly.

Emotional Literacy is still a fairly new field is education and was constructed on the theory of Emotional Intelligence. Psychologist Salovey and Mayer (1990) first classified emotional intelligence into four categories as the ability to: accurately recognise emotions, use emotions to facilitate thinking, understand the meaning of emotions, and manage emotions. Steiner (2003) on the other hand believed these emotional skills not only improved people’s lives but were at the very heart of human nature.

Essentially, Emotional Literacy was Emotional Intelligence with a heart. It allowed one to feel and understand a range of emotions and regulated them according to actual experiences (Seeburger, 1997; Steiner, 2003). Bruce (2010) simplified Emotional Literacy as “a way of being, not just of doing.”