Developing Empathy through Reading Young Adult Literature and Raising Awareness for Mental Health Issues by the Use of Jennifer Niven¿s "All the Bright Places" in the EFL Classroom

Studienarbeit aus dem Jahr 2021 im Fachbereich Didaktik für das Fach Englisch - Literatur, Werke, Note: 2,0, Universität zu Köln, Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: How does reading Young Adult Literature contribute to the development of empathy, and how can this process be addressed and fostered in the classroom - using the example of All the Bright Places by Jennifer Niven? To answer this question, I will first outline how readers develop empathy in the process of reading Young Adult Literature, in order to illustrate this in the following chapter using All the Bright Places by Jennifer Niven as an example. These findings will also be related to foreign language teaching: goals as well as teaching ideas will be suggested on how All the Bright Places can be used in the classroom to support the empathy development of adolescents. Have you ever cried while reading, could you ever not help smiling, or even laughed out loud? Have you ever felt so involved in a story that you could not think about anything else, and your emotional life was dependent from the emotional life of the protagonists? In these moments, the reader's emotional life is significantly influenced by the story in his/her hands. All the Bright Places by Jennifer Niven is a story comparable to Shakespeare¿s Romeo and Juliet. Two members of completely different social groups, who are unhappy with their lives, surprisingly fall in love and try to safe each other ¿ but cannot. Since the two protagonists, Finch and Violet, suffer from different mental illnesses and traumas, All the Bright Places also addresses a topic that still receives too little empathy in our society. In teacher trainings, you gain an understanding of some of the skills that are developed through reading literature. Accordingly, one of the things people learn through reading literary texts is to adopt the perspectives of others because in the flow of reading one is repeatedly confronted with the opinions, feelings, and thoughts of other (fictional) individuals. If reading fictional literature promotes the ability to understand the perspectives of others, does it not by inference also promote the ability to empathise? Is reading fictional texts a component of the development of empathy? And how big, how significant, is this component?