Social-Emotional Learning as Task Architecture: How Guru Penggerak Teachers Integrate SEL in the EFL Classroom

Abstract

Foreign language anxiety continues to hold many students back from speaking English, and social-emotional learning has emerged as a promising way to ease that barrier. Much of the existing research confirms that such learning benefits students but says little about how trained teachers actually build it into their lessons. This study set out to close that gap by examining how English teachers who graduated from Indonesia's Guru Penggerak program integrate social-emotional learning in the classroom, and what specific strategies they rely on. The research used a qualitative case study design. Two certified English teachers from state senior high schools in Malang took part, and data came from an open-ended questionnaire and in-depth interviews, analyzed thematically through data reduction, data display, and conclusion drawing, with source triangulation to strengthen trustworthiness. The findings show that both teachers held a firm grasp of the five social-emotional competencies and wove them into the structure of their language tasks rather than teaching them as separate content. Their strategies included structured group roles, reflective journals, discussion of social issues, and outdoor learning. These approaches produced a classroom that students found safe and participatory, which lowered their anxiety and raised their motivation to communicate. The study contributes a model of social-emotional learning as task architecture and suggests that teacher training programs should prepare teachers to design task structures, since it is the design of the task that carries the social-emotional learning.