Effects of meditation on Language Learning: A Case Study.

Abstract

Schools continuously search for ways to meet the academic, social-emotional and behavioural needs of students, who often live serious personal challenges in and outside of school: anxiety, low self-esteem and emotional coping among others. Meditation has been recently introduced into schools settings as an innovative practice, a cognitive-behavioural intervention whose aim is to help students to enhance psychological awareness and scholastic achievement and cope emotional self-regulation. After a brief definition of students challenges in language learning, a critical review of the literature is provided, in order to probe the benefits of the meditative practice in schools. This thesis focuses and discusses the method applied in an Indian school as a case study, where meditation is offered to students. The work analyses data collected in the same school, in order to describe the relevance and show the effects of meditative practices in language learning, as an instrument to cope anxiety, communication apprehension, fear of evaluation as well as to increase attention, self-esteem and self-confidence. Finally, in light of the results provided, the reliability and practice of meditation as a potential effective instrument for language learning is discussed.