Teaching mindfulness to ELL students as a social-emotional learning wartime coping strategy: a multimodality perspective

Abstract

This article focuses on exploring the pressing issue of teaching armed conflict affected English language learning (ELL) Ukrainian students to be mindful to better cope with wartime stressors for the sake of their psychological, physical health, intellectual and emotional well-being, enhanced resilience and ethical sustainability. Within the methodological framework of social emotional learning and linguocognitive paradigms, the authors have substantiated the status of the time-tested practice of mindfulness as a coping tool kit to be integrated in teaching English to students in conflict settings. As a result of the study conducted, it has been concluded that consistent practices of teaching mindfulness to students who suffer from war (post)-traumatic stress disorders, depression, anxiety, lack of hope, fear, have promising linguodidactic and psychological implications that result in students’ language performance improvements. On the basis of analytically summarizing methods to implement (non-)verbally represented mindfulness as a coping mechanism in the corresponding EFL environment, the authors have come up with a four-dimensional mindfulness developing model of multimodal coping strategies for war affected ELL students. The matrix model suggested includes problem-focused, emotion-focused, avoidance and faith-based linguodidactic activities with an emphasis on the multimodal nature of mindfulness. The most efficient exercises are presented in the paper. It has been pointed out that mindfulness can be taught through listening, speaking, writing, reading practices, as well as through stimulating verbally and non-verbally actualized visual, auditory, olfactory, haptic, and gustatory types of perception, The pilot research project carried out, whose outcomes are to be perspectively refined, interculturally enriched and amalgamated into a coursebook, has proved that helping ELL students with wartime experience to be more mindful through adaptive coping strategies can mediate and moderate the negative impact of armed conflict trauma on their mental health and well-being.