Emotional Competence (EQ) is a central key mediating factor with a considerable impact in all areas of a child's development. Despite its relevancy, there are currently only a few longitudinally oriented studies that focus on the development of emotional competencies, its conditions and changeability in childhood. First, few studies have shown that emotional competencies are related to a large extent with language skills. Thus, the question arose as to what extent the discussion of literary texts can promote emotional competencies. To date, there are no studies on this issue.

We hypothesize that reading and discussing children’s books with a high literary / aesthetic level increases emotional competencies in children. In addition, we are interested in the relationship between emotional competencies and language competencies. Based on these assumptions, which have not yet been empirically validated, we developed and implemented a reading program and tested it on 105 primary school children (second and third graders) during their attendance at after-school care centres. Children within the same care centre who did not participate in the reading program (N=105) formed the control group.

The evaluation study has a quasi-experimental pre-post design, and ran from March to July 2009. The aim of this study is the evaluation of this reading program based on a children's book selected for its affective content. We developed new evaluation instruments to measure emotional and language competencies in children before the implementation and evaluation of the reading program.