Picturebooks take teachers and learners beyond mere language learning and contribute to developing learners’ cognitive, socio¬emotional and aesthetic competencies together with their language and literacy skills. Many picturebooks contain messages that enable children to develop their understanding of social situations, and foster an understanding of how people think and feel, important capacities that distinguish humans from other living things.
This presentation will look at picturebooks that present common social situations for primary children (e.g. daily routines and owning a pet), but which provide access to ‘an other’s story’, as such showing and telling another point of view. Looking in particular at the image word interaction, I suggest that by using such picturebooks in the FL classroom, and by stimulating active learning through interpretation and booktalk, it is possible to contribute to enhancing primary learners’ emotional intelligence, in particular, their theory of mind and empathy skills.