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New explanatory videos from the FDS-G project: Talking about feelings while developing language skills—how does that work?
How can children expand their language skills in their everyday school life? For example, by talking about their feelings. This connection between language development and talking about feelings is the focus of the eight explanatory videos from the Ministry of Education’s collaborative project “Feeling – Thinking – Speaking in Elementary School” (FDS-G). The videos are now freely available: Link.
Two instructional videos introduce language development integrated into everyday life (“seizing every opportunity”) and so-called language teaching strategies. These refer to simple conversational techniques that teachers and after-school program staff can use to pick up on children’s comments, expand upon them, and enrich their language—all without any additional support sessions! Emotions provide particularly good opportunities for such conversations. Children love to talk about what makes them happy, upset, or sad. To do so, they need the right words and sentence patterns, which they learn from their attentive adult conversation partners—especially when their interest is at its peak. Those who have learned to accurately describe their inner feelings can express themselves better, understand others more effectively, and resolve conflicts more easily.
Six short practical tips illustrate this in concrete terms. Using AI-generated classroom scenes, they show how teachers and childcare professionals apply language support in everyday life: how they serve as linguistic role models, model vocabulary, and encourage children to speak. The videos are aimed at teachers, educational professionals, parents, and anyone else interested.
The goal is to bring the research findings to where they are needed: into schools and into children’s everyday lives.
The videos are part of the findings from FDS-G, a collaborative project between Leuphana University of Lüneburg, the Technical University of Braunschweig, and the University of Kassel. Prof. Dr. Maria von Salisch, a renowned developmental psychologist at Leuphana University of Lüneburg, was primarily responsible for the project.
Link to the videos.