/ Speech and Language Therapy Advice
For High School Pupils
How To Help A Pupil With Emotional Literacy /

This is the ability to recognise, understand and appropriately express emotions. This is also the ability to respond appropriately to emotions expressed by other people

Possible Implications / Useful Strategies
Difficulty stating own feelings / Assess the pupil’s ability to understand and use the vocabulary of emotions.
Provide symbols, pictures or words to represent different emotions.
Explain how emotion vocabulary can be grouped but still have slightly different meanings e.g. anxious, worried, and terrified.
Discuss that a feeling can be strong or weak i.e. very angry or just beginning to feel angry. Use visual means to represent this and plot where the pupil is e.g. on a rising thermometer.
Introduce a daily diary to record feelings at different points of the day.
Difficulty understanding the feelings of others / Discuss feelings within situations as they arise.
Use books, role play or TV clips to identify feelings in the characters.
Discuss the clues that tell you how someone is feeling e.g. tone of voice, facial expression and the words they use.
Difficulty seeing things from another’s perspective / State the feelings of others when required or appropriate.
Discuss how what you say or what you do may affect others.
Tendency to express emotions physically rather than verbally / Provide a safe haven when needed.
Discuss strategies to help the pupil act appropriately e.g. walk away, count to 10. Practice and reward for using these strategies.
Difficulty empathising with story characters / Explore the emotions of fictional characters in books and plays.
Difficulty role playing character’s feelings / Practise expressing emotions verbally or non-verbally in role play.
Discuss the physical aspects of the feeling in the body, the facial expression, the volume and tone of voice as well as the words themselves

Some children require more structured interventions. Contact Salford Learning Support Service, for information on Social Stories and Comic Strip Conversations. Email:

Visit our website www.speakupsalford.nhs.uk for more information on speech, language and communication and how to help.

Further information can be found in Secondary Language Builders -Advice and activities to encourage the communication skills of 11-16 year olds available from www.elklan.co.uk.

Salford Speech and Language Therapy Service run the course Speech and Language Support for 11-16's that accompanies this book, annually. Contact for further information.

Speech and Language Therapy Team, Learning Support Service, Produced Jan 2013