Investigating students' social and emotional language learning competences at a university context

In the last quarter-century, the importance of fostering students' social and emotional skills alongside their academic growth has been proven repeatedly by researchers and educators (Durlak et al., 2015). Traditionally, emotions and social skills are not considered important in foreign language teaching, and instead, the academic success of a learner is found more valuable. The main focus of this study is to investigate the SEFLL competences of university English language preparatory class students. This study also aims to explore if there are any significant differences in students' SEFLL competences based upon their demographic characteristics such as their gender, age, income status and their parents' educational background, employment status and prior knowledge of foreign languages. "Social Emotional Foreign Language Learning Scale" (SEFLLS), developed by Zaimoğlu (2018) was used in order to measure participants' SEFLL competences. This study was conducted at the School of Foreign Languages of a Turkish university. The sample of this study consists of 127 university English language preparatory students. The results revealed that participants had relatively higher competency in social relations and decision-making competences compared to self-regulation. Results also revealed that participants' age, parents' employment status and mothers' prior knowledge of foreign languages affected their SEFLL competences.