Integrating Social-Emotional Learning into Language Classrooms

By Daniel Tse

In her article for Issue 52, Setterfield highlights the benefits of Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) as a method that targets one’s holistic development. She also suggests ways in which teachers can develop their own social-emotional skills. In this article, let us turn our attention to how learners can do the same in language classrooms. I shall reflect on my teaching experience and illustrate how SEL can be integrated into various lesson activities.

SEL competences

Although SEL was originally conceived for mainstream education in the United States, certain areas do nonetheless apply to language teaching and learning. In this regard, Pentón Herrara and Darragh (2024) state that while different theoretical frameworks can be drawn upon, the most frequently discussed is the one by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL). According to this SEL framework, there are five competences that learners can develop at the ‘classroom’ level: self-awareness, social awareness, relationship skills, self-management, and responsible decision-making.

Self-awareness

There is often a gap between our self-perception and real image, no matter how small it might be. Feldenkrais (1972: 23), however, claims this gap may be as wide as ‘three hundred percent’. Self-awareness not only requires one to be conscious of one’s thoughts and feelings, but entails having a more accurate understanding of the self.

When I teach teenage learners the adjectives describing emotions, I usually begin my lesson with a lead-in activity. In this activity, learners think about how they felt in the previous twenty-four hours, and what might have caused them to feel this way. If it is an Elementary group, I reduce the level of challenge by asking my students to simply consider their feelings and corresponding situations. The post-activity stage involves the students’ descriptions and comparisons of their own feelings in pairs or small groups. Later in the lesson, learners practise using the target adjectives to complete sentences: they write about the situations that make them feel in a particular way, for example ‘I feel excited when …’. More zadvanced students can extend their responses by adding information to their descriptions.

Another type of activity is grammar practice. In discussion tasks, I have used questions about hypothetical actions to encourage undergraduate students to articulate their personal thoughts. An example is ‘What would you do if you didn’t have enough time to finish your assignment?’ When the students compare their hypothetical actions, they are also practising using the second conditional.

Although it takes more than language practice alone to develop self-awareness, language systems such as the ones mentioned above make it possible for SEL to be integrated into personalised lesson activities.

Social awareness

According to the CASEL framework, empathy is a prerequisite for social awareness. This refers to the ability to understand how other people feel and how they see things from their perspective. In teen and adult classes, learners can develop empathy by practising actively listening to each other.

Let me use follow-on discussion tasks to illustrate the link to active listening. After the main listening or reading comprehension tasks, learners can discuss their personal response to the text, hence the word ‘follow-on’. This reflects contemporary practice as much as the underlying approach used in most textbooks, whether one completely agrees with a textbook-driven methodology or not. As Harmer (1991) suggests, follow-on discussion makes receptive skills work more meaningful by mirroring real-life listening and reading. It can also increase learner engagement with the text, which he calls the ‘cuddle factor’.

In discussion tasks, it is crucial that learners have a purpose for listening so that they genuinely pay attention to their pair or group partners. I make the purpose explicit by giving my students a clear task in my instructions, such as finding a certain number of similar ideas or identifying any different views. More advanced learners are encouraged to respond to their classmates’ ideas by asking at least one follow-up question. Nevertheless, it is wishful thinking that all learners will feel motivated to do so. This is why the post-discussion feedback, if conducted properly, can highlight the importance of active listening. When the learners know that the teacher is going to nominate them randomly to report on their discussion, and that feedback includes a sample of interesting or contrasting ideas, it motivates them to listen more attentively to their classmates’ contributions.

The source text and the questions for discussion are equally important. Texts that contain situations, problems or opinions lend themselves to the kinds of questions that will enable learners to empathise with other people. In the follow-on discussion, therefore, learners can imagine how different characters in the text feel and why those people think in a certain way. As learners improve their active listening skills and develop empathy for other people, they are in a better position to increase their social awareness.

Relationship skills

It would be difficult for learners to form meaningful connections unless they are given opportunities to collaborate with each other in the classroom. Group work, therefore, represents the perfect medium through which learners can develop their relationship skills. While some group activities work more effectively than others, an activity that has always worked well for me is peer teaching in vocabulary lessons.

In many recently published textbooks, the target vocabulary is presented as a fairly long list of items before a listening or reading text within a unit. Rather than use teacher-led clarification or supplementary matching tasks with definitions, I sometimes ask my teenage and adult students to help each other with the target vocabulary. This allows me to direct lesson time towards teaching what needs learning most. In my experience, peer teaching is feasible when the students already have a basic knowledge of most of the target vocabulary items.

To facilitate peer teaching, the teacher needs to divide the whole class into multiple groups. Each group is assigned different target vocabulary items to be sorted into three lists: ‘words you know’, ‘words you do not know’, and ‘words you are not sure about’. As learners work together, they can fill other group partners’ knowledge gaps. In the post-task feedback, the teacher chooses one group to tell the whole class which vocabulary items they are still struggling with; the other groups are invited to teach their classmates. As a facilitator, I can correct my students as needed and further clarify any target vocabulary items if I foresee any outstanding issues of meaning, pronunciation, connotation or other relevant aspects.

When learners collaborate with each other in their learning process, they work towards a shared goal and can thus build stronger relationships over time.

Self-management

There are multiple target areas within the self-management competence, one of which is personal and collective agency. The notion of agency refers to one’s ability to take actions independently to realise goals (Larsen-Freeman et al., 2021). Unlike learner autonomy, which approaches the notion purely from the learners’ perspective, learner agency takes into account the influence of other stakeholders such as teachers.

I think teachers can promote learner agency both directly and indirectly. An example of a direct approach is group discussion in which learners reflect on their coping strategies, such as how they have overcome difficulties or managed raw feelings in challenging situations. An indirect approach involves learners making their own decisions in their learning process. It is the latter approach that I would like to describe.

In writing tasks, I often give my students the ability to choose from multiple options where practical, especially in business English lessons. The range of options in a task depends on my students’ existing schemata. In the self-designed task below, elements of learner agency are already embedded in the task content.

Writing task

You have received the following email from your client.

Write a reply to Sam Patel. In your email, you should include:

• information about the correct software setting
• a possible cause of the sound quality problem
• a solution to this problem

Write about 75 words.

(source: author’s own work)

In the above task, learners can write about a software program of their own choice; however, they are still responding to the same task prompts and producing the same type of text. This promotes a degree of independence in the learners’ decision-making and can thus develop their self-management skills.

Responsible Decision-Making

We make numerous decisions in our everyday lives, but to do so in a responsible manner, we need to be able to think critically and comprehensively. How can teachers foster this kind of thinking habit in their students?

In early 2024 and 2025, I was sent to an Italian high school to teach topic-based ‘immersion’ courses. As the overall aim of these courses was to develop the students’ collaboration and communication skills, classroom mini-projects represented my natural choice of lesson activities. In one of the mini-projects, I asked each group of students to identify a problem affecting their local community, which they would later report on in their spoken presentations. Students had to come up with several solutions to their chosen problem. They were also required to consider the potential impact of each solution on various parts of their community.

During the preparation phase, I encouraged my students to extend their ideas by asking them open-ended prompt questions. I also dealt with their emergent language, or non-target language items that arise spontaneously in their written or spoken output (Chinn and Norrington-Davies, 2023). This was done by focussing the whole class on any exemplary language or salient errors before they gave their spoken presentations.

By asking learners to consider how their potential decisions would affect themselves and other people, teachers can train them to become more responsible decision-makers.

Conclusion

The CASEL framework adopts a holistic approach that entails participation from different stakeholders in the learning process. At the classroom level, SEL can be integrated into various lesson activities, including language practice, skills practice, and mini-projects. What is evident is that many SEL elements are already embedded in current ELT practice. Teachers can, therefore, target one of the five competences by incorporating its supporting skills or abilities in the learning aims of lesson activities.

Bibliography

Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning. What is the CASEL SEL framework? https://casel.org/fundamentals-of-sel/.
Feldenkrais, M. Awareness Through Movement. New York: Harper & Row (1972).
Harmer, J. ‘The cuddle factor’ in Practical English Teaching, Vol. 11/2. Ulaanbaatar: ELI Mongolia (1991).
Larsen-Freeman, D., Driver, P., Gao, X., & Mercer, S. Learner Agency: Maximizing Learner Potential [PDF]. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2021).
Pentón Herrara, L.J. and Darragh, J. Social-Emotional Learning in English Language Teaching. Ann Arbor (MI): University of Michigan Press (2024).

Author Biography