Teaching English through guided meditation

Abstract

In our never-ending search for the most efficient and eloquent ways of teaching English as a foreign language, we have identified “Guided meditation” as an interesting and challenging alternative approach and strategy. This paper discusses the notions of “linguistics”, “applied linguistics” and “psycholinguistics” and it tackles several teaching methods connected to guided meditation, such as “Suggestopedia” and the “Natural Approach”. It further deals with the main differences between “mindfulness”, “guided meditation” and “transcendentalism”, and then it aims at showing and explaining ways of using guided meditation practice for boosting teaching and learning English as a foreign language, mainly based on Tatiana Slama-Cazacu’s dynamic-contextual methodology (1999). The paper also designs an experiment that is going to be implemented in the first semester of the academic year 2021-2022, based on the hypothesis that the students engaged in guided meditation strategies can generate new ideas (be creative), cooperate with their colleagues, learn, reflect and think critically, improving thus their communication abilities in English. For this purpose, the research framework of the paper presents the subjects, the main research methods, the data collection instruments and the stages of the experiment (administering an initial and an achievement test, a pre-survey and a post-survey, conceiving activities, collecting work samples and the teacher’s observation notes).