Emotion-based language instruction (EBLI) as a new perspective in bilingual education

To speed up and facilitate the process of bilingualism or multilingualism, researchers and scholars have proposed many methods and approaches that have mostly grown out of linguistic, psychological, or sociological schools of thought. However, this field has been slow to recognise the importance of emotional capacities, particularly the ones which the learners possess while learning their mother tongue and probably carry over to their L2 learning process. Drawing on the under-researched Developmental, Individual-Difference, Relationship-Based (DIR) model of language acquisition, this paper presents Emotion-Based Language Instruction (EBLI) as a new approach to bilingual education. The relevant concepts of Emotioncy, Emotionalization, and Inter-emotionality are introduced before the paper concludes by making suggestions as to how the applications of DIR to bilingual education might improve second/foreign language learning and teaching. Copyright © 2013 Pishghadam et al.; licensee Springer.