Promoting Peace Education via Language Teaching

Today, many children around the world increasingly face violence and bullying in their schools. There are different approaches globally to prevent and resolve this issue. One of them is peace education. Peace education aims to cultivate and bring up in children different skills, attitudes and values such as listening, tolerance, empathy, non-violent behavior, responsibility, proactivity, understanding and respect for different cultures. The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between peace education and language teaching in the classroom. The researcher collected the data by conducting a pedagogical experiment, pre-test, post-test and statistical analysis. An important finding of this study is that it is hard to determine the effectiveness of peace education in the English language classroom. Meanwhile, it was found that peace education is conducive to a friendly atmosphere in the English language classroom. Children study with an interest and their cooperation is on a high level. Furthermore, it is implied that more education materials should be devised for young English learners by the educators and experts specializing in peace education. The results discussed in this paper can be of practical value to teachers and parents of young children; to higher education institutions focusing on violence and bullying prevention; to educators specializing in peace building and education in general