Exploring Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) in Cross-Cultural Classrooms: How SEL Supports International Students’ Adaptation in Higher Education

Description

Internationalized higher education has produced cross-cultural classrooms where students and lecturers negotiate differences in language, communication styles, and values on a daily basis. For many international students, the resulting emotional load—stress, loneliness, uncertainty about implicit norms intersects with academic demands such as heavy reading, unfamiliar assessment formats and participation expectations. When these pressures accumulate, they can undermine
students’ sense of belonging and willingness to take risks in learning, even when they possess sufficient cognitive ability and prior academic success.
This dissertation investigates how Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) supports international students’ adaptation in higher education classrooms in China, focusing on a Sino-foreign university context where English is the medium of instruction. Guided by Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory and the Community of Inquiry (CoI) perspective on emotional presence, the study adopts an exploratory qualitative design that triangulates semi-structured interviews (n = 4), non-participant classroom observations, and reflective journals collected from four students over six weeks. The research foregrounds international students’ lived experiences of emotion, silence, language anxiety and peer relationships in cross-cultural classrooms, and examines how specific SEL practices shape these experiences.
Findings indicate that culturally responsive implementations of SEL—such as explicit emotion vocabulary, identity-safe discussion norms, structured peer support roles, translanguaging-friendly language policies, and collaborative goal setting—promote emotional safety, intercultural empathy, and productive participation. Students’ speaking time rose by approximately 30 seconds per turn during SELinfused activities; three focal students exceeded this average, increasing from around
18 seconds to 45 seconds per turn across the six-week period. Reflective journals recorded 37 emotion-word instances across early submissions, with a gradual shift from predominantly negative emotions (stress, anxiety, loneliness) towards more agentic terms (confidence, curiosity, belonging) in later entries.
The dissertation contributes to the limited empirical literature on SEL in nonWestern higher education by offering a process-sensitive account of how SEL functions as cultural mediation in cross-cultural classrooms. It proposes an eight-step implementation framework for Culturally Responsive SEL (CR-SEL) in universities and a programme-level agenda for staff development, international student induction, and ethically informed learning analytics. The study concludes that
SEL, when designed as a culturally responsive, discipline-sensitive toolkit rather than a generic wellbeing add-on, can significantly support international students’ adaptation and sustain more equitable participation in academic discourse.

Period	2025 → 2026