It is well recognized globally that confronting social and emotional challenges is just a natural, inevitable facet of human experience as is building effective social and emotional skills a necessary condition not only for one’s success in life, but also for social progress and well-being (OECD, 2015, 2017). This recognition is anchored especially in multiple rationalities (e.g., human capital, developmental, educational) supporting the global “whole child” movement that advocates equipping children with a balanced repertoire of cognitive abilities as well as social and emotional skills to better tackle 21st century challenges and demands. Reflecting the global human capital rationality, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (2015, 2017) (an international organization aimed at establishing “better policies for better lives”) valorized social and emotional competence as essential for developing the whole child and contributing to the progress and well-being of broader communities and societies as a whole. From the developmental perspective, the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child (2007) asserted, “Emotional well-being and social competence provide a strong foundation for emerging cognitive abilities, and together they are the bricks and mortar that comprise the foundation of human development” (p. 8). Reflecting the educational rationality, the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) (https://casel.org/), a nonprofit organization established in 1994 and headquartered in the United States, has been at the forefront of the burgeoning global movement promoting social and emotional learning (SEL). In fact, credited for introducing the concept of SEL, CASEL (2020) has been advocating the integration of SEL as a vital part of a high-quality and equitable educational process from preschool through high school.

While SEL is becoming a global pursuit, there is currently a paucity of research on SEL in cultural contexts outside of North America. In their scoping review of 42 empirical articles on SEL in early childhood, Hayashi et al. (2022) found that over the last two decades, while there has been burgeoning research on SEL, the majority of studies (95%) were conducted in North America, with only meager efforts in other cultural contexts. This finding echoes that of McCallops et al. (2019) who systematically identified and reviewed 51 school-based SEL intervention studies conducted during the second decade of the 21st century, revealing that the majority of them (75%) were situated in the United States.

It is not surprising then that even though SEL has been promoted in kindergarten education by education policy in Hong Kong (the Curriculum Development Council, 2017), there is a dearth of empirical research on children’s SEL in the Hong Kong context. Among the few studies that did involve young children in Hong Kong kindergarten settings, they tended to focus exclusively on enhancing children’s social competence through interventions at the child level (e.g., Leung, 2010), the parent level (e.g., Chau et al., 2022), or the teacher level (Lam & Wong, 2017). However, beyond these interventions, little is understood how early childhood teachers in Hong Kong might actually foster children’s SEL (Wu & Mok, 2017). To address this lacuna in the literature, we were keen to explore this relatively uncharted terrain by investigating how children's SEL might have woven through the process of social learning within the context of teachers' social and emotional teaching (SET).

Social Learning Theory as the Guiding Conceptual Framework

From birth, children organically learn and develop at a generally rapid pace. This phenomenon has led to many theories about how children learn and develop. One prominent theory is the social learning theory proposed by Albert Bandura (1971), positing that children learn by observing, modeling, and imitating the behaviors, dispositions, and emotional responses of others within their social contexts. However, drawing from behavioral and cognitive theories, Bandura emphasized that such “observational learning” could not be realized if cognitive processes were not involved in tandem. This concept gives rise to the importance of the interaction between social and cognitive processes in shaping human learning and behavior. From this perspective, Bandura (1971) further underscored that individuals do not passively nor automatically observe a model's behavior and imitate it without thought. That is, according to Bandura, prior to imitation, there is a cognitive process known as “mediation process” comprising four elements: (1) “attention” (individuals must first pay attention to the behavior being observed); (2) “retention” (individuals must be able to retain the observed behavior in memory to be recalled later); (3) “reproduction” (individuals must be able to reproduce or imitate the observed behavior); and (4) “motivation” (individuals must be motivated to reproduce or imitate the observed behavior). In sum, Bandura theorized that through these four aspects of the mediation process, individuals actively engage in acquiring and processing information from their environment to guide their own behavior. Informed by the social learning theory, we investigated how children’s SEL might be manifested in their observation, modeling, and imitation of their teachers’ direct SET behavior.

The Definition, Nature, and Importance of SEL

While SEL has been variously defined, the core message encapsulated by these definitions appears generally to be one and the same (e.g., CASEL, 2020; OECD, 2017). This study adopted CASEL’s (2020) updated definition of SEL that captures the fundamental aspects of SEL:

SEL is the process through which all young people and adults acquire and apply the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to develop healthy identities, manage emotions and achieve personal and collective goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain supportive relationships, and make responsible and caring decisions (p. 1).

This definition suggests that the concept of SEL itself is essentially two parts of a whole. That is, SEL refers to learning in two umbrella competency areas. The first area concerns social competence/literacy broadly defined as the ability to engage in prosocial behaviors including cooperating, sharing, resolving conflicts, turn-taking, and communicating effectively (e.g., Denham & Brown, 2010; Yoder, 2014), and demonstrating perspective-taking and empathy (e.g., Colwell & Hart, 2006). The second area focuses on emotional competence/literacy defined generally as the ability to acquire and apply emotional knowledge, expressiveness, regulation, and awareness of one’s emotions as well as those of others (e.g., Ashiabi, 2000; Figueroa-Sánchez, 2008; Izard et al., 2001). SEL may be considered a holistic approach that recognizes the interlinking and mutually-reinforcing nature of social and emotional competencies (CASEL, 2020). For instance, to thrive in social contexts, children need to develop emotional awareness and build positive relationships with others.

SEL is a critical developmental task and serves as an essential building block for other developmental areas. Decades of investigation (e.g., Berrueta-Clement et al., 1984; Shonkoff et al., 2000; Weiland & Yoshikawa, 2013) in early childhood has established that the period from birth to age 5 constitutes a “critical period” of rapid development in foundational skills, such as language, social and emotional, and cognitive abilities. It is because during this period, the brain's neuroplasticity—its ability to adapt to new experiences—is crucial for learning and development, thereby laying the “neural architecture” throughout life (Shonkoff et al., 2000). Among the foundational skills, SEL is considered an integral building block of children’s ability to appropriately incorporate thinking, feeling, and behavior to achieve other key developmental tasks (Denham, 2018). Furthermore, research has confirmed both short-term and long-term effects of SEL (or lack thereof) on children’s developmental and academic outcomes ((e.g., Izard et al., 2001; McClelland et al., 2017; Nix et al., 2013; Rimm-Kaufman et al., 2000; Taylor et al., 2017; Zins et al., 2007).

Empirical evidence has also revealed specific teaching strategies as effective in facilitating SEL in children. These strategies include conducting “daily feelings check-ins” and modeling social and emotional skills (Chen & Badolato, 2023), engaging children in targeted social and emotional conversations and shared book reading and discussion (e.g., Bassett et al., 2020; Chen & Adams, 2023; Chen & O’Donnell, 2022; Ng & Sun, 2022), and teaching children how to use language to express their feelings and emotions properly (Denham & Brown, 2010). All of these pedagogical strategies tend to occur within the context of teacher–child interactions considered to be a crucial part of the quality process in early childhood education. As teacher–child interactions have been found to promote child development and learning (e.g., NICHD ECCRN, 2002; Pianta, 2016; Pianta et al., 2005), teachers can promote SEL when interacting with children by ways, such as modeling appropriate emotions, affirming or confirming children’s expressions of emotions in a supportive manner, and conducting direct instruction on emotional experience (e.g., Morris et al., 2013; Yoder, 2014).

We conceptualized that SEL begets more SEL through what we term, SET. While SEL is a commonplace concept in the literature, SET is not. In fact, in our literature review, we did not find any use of the term SET in connection to SEL. Thus, we proposed and applied this particular concept of SET in this study as a means to better understand SEL in children as reflecting the active element of social learning within the context of teaching.

Cultural Variations and Educational Priorities in SEL

Despite the global recognition of the significance of SEL in fostering children’s success in school and later in life, and by extension, in contributing to society’s well-being, there are cultural variations in the extent to which SEL is prioritized. In the individualist-oriented culture of the United States where SEL is originated, SEL aligns fittingly with Western cultural values and early childhood education that promote the whole-child development (e.g., creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving, autonomy) including social and emotional development (e.g., emotion expression, emotion regulation, prosocial behavior) (CASEL, 2020). In contrast, in a relatively Confucian-inspired collectivist Chinese society of Hong Kong, children are socialized to practice cultural values that include emphasizing reverence for and obedience to adults or authority figures and prioritizing social harmony over individual autonomy (Chen, 2005; Chen et al., 2017). For instance, research on cultural variations on emotion expression has revealed that individuals from Chinese and other Asian cultures tend to prioritize collective harmony over individual emotional expression, in contrast to the more individualistic emotional expression commonly observed among European Americans (Tsai et al., 2002). Such findings corroborate the significant influence of culture on individuals’ behavior (Chen, 2005, 2019). In the context of the teaching–learning process in the classroom, teachers are expected to serve as both the socializer of cultural values and the model of moral principles, while children learn from their teachers by explicitly observing and potentially imitating their behaviors (Chen & Liang, 2017).

Reflecting their academic- and examination-oriented education systems, East Asian societies, especially China (Zong et al., 2024), Hong Kong (Wu & Mok, 2017), and Taiwan (Wilkinson & Kao, 2019), tend to prioritize academic pursuits over SEL. Even if teachers desire to integrate SEL in their teaching, there appears to be a lack of professional learning in SEL, let alone SET strategies, for teachers in these Chinese cultural contexts. For instance, in surveying 167 kindergarten teachers teaching and interviewing 10 of them in China, Zong et al. (2024) found that while demonstrating a positive disposition toward SEL as critical to children’s overall development, these teachers lacked pedagogical content knowledge to effectively implement SEL in their daily classroom activities. In the case of Hong Kong, early childhood education there often let propositional learning and knowledge acquisition take precedence over other aspects of children’s growth, especially SEL (Wilkinson & Kao, 2019). Thus, it is not clear the extent to which children in Hong Kong acquire SEL from their teachers’ SET behavior.

CASEL 5 as the Analytical Framework

Worldwide, there is a growing interest in SEL as evident in the many conceptual frameworks proposed (e.g., Berg et al., 2017). Among them, CASEL’s SEL framework has gained a particularly strong foothold in the early childhood community beyond the United States (e.g., Anthony et al., 2020; Eklund et al., 2018; Frye et al., 2022; Gresham et al., 2020) to include other societies, such as Australia (Kirk & Jay, 2018) and Singapore (Ng & Sun, 2022). Given the absence of a culturally specific SEL framework in the Hong Kong context, we decided to employ the CASEL’s SEL framework to guide our analysis, while remaining cognizant of the cultural differences between Hong Kong and the United States (Chen et al., 2017).

The CASEL’s SEL framework (often referred to as “CASEL 5”) is conceptualized as multidimensional, comprising five core interrelated competencies coalesced around three dimensions, with Self-Awareness and Self-Management aligning with the intrapersonal dimension, Social Awareness and Relationship Skills with the interpersonal dimension, and Responsible Decision-Making with either the intrapersonal or interpersonal dimension (see Table 1 for the definition and associated capacities for each competency). The intrapersonal and interpersonal dimensions have been categorized and examined by previous studies (e.g., Ng & Sun, 2022).

Table 1 The CASEL 5 competencies, definitions, and examples of capacities involved (CASEL, 2020, p. 2)
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In addition to its educational significance, CASEL 5 appears to be developmentally and culturally relevant. According to CASEL (2020), CASEL 5 “can be taught and applied at various developmental stages from childhood to adulthood” and can be applied across diverse cultural contexts (p. 2). These two affirming developmental and cultural factors collectively provide a sound rationale for adopting CASEL 5 as the appropriate theoretical and analytical framework for the current study on SET and SET in Hong Kong.

SEL and SET in the Context of Hong Kong’s Kindergarten Education

In Hong Kong, kindergarten education comprises three typical levels: (1) Nursery (K1) serving children ages 3–4, Lower Kindergarten (K2) for children ages 4–5, and Upper Kindergarten (K3) for children ages 5–6. Since the 1990s, the Hong Kong government has been promoting the “holistic development” or the “whole-person development” of children that includes the social and emotional domain as part of a comprehensive and balanced pre-primary education (Hong Kong Curriculum Development Council, 2006; Hong Kong Curriculum Development Institute, 1996). This emphasis has been subsequently amplified in the kindergarten education reform as documented by the Curriculum Development Council (2017). However, the integration of SEL in the educational agenda has been proven more complex in practice than in theoretical policy. For one, education in Hong Kong has had a long tradition of being examination-driven and correspondingly emphasizing success in academic more than non-academic (e.g., SEL) domains; for another, there has not been any explicit widespread policy on specific SEL guidelines implemented in Hong Kong, making it unclear how social and emotional skills should be taught (Wu & Mok, 2017). Considering the hierarchical structure of Chinese culture in Hong Kong and the predominantly teacher-directed, whole-group instructional approach in kindergarten classrooms (Chen & Liang, 2017), we anticipated that the children’s SEL would involve social learning by observing, modeling, and imitating the teachers’ SET behavior. To test this supposition, we investigated how children might weave their SEL through social learning in the context of whole-group teaching, which is the most dominant form of instruction in Hong Kong kindergarten classrooms.

The Goal of this Study

The literature just reviewed suggests that there is a strong need to examine teacher–child interactions as a potential catalyst for promoting SEL in children, especially in Hong Kong kindergarten classrooms where research in this area is virtually non-existent. To contribute knowledge to the early childhood literature and align with Bandura’s (1971) social learning theory, we investigated the concordance between teachers’ SET and children’s SEL in terms of the CASEL 5 and the strategies employed as potential evidence of what Bandura’s (1971) described as “observational learning” and “mediation process.” To this end, we investigated the following four research questions:

  1. (1)

    Which of the CASEL 5 do teachers teach the most and children learn the most?

  2. (2)

    Which strategies do teachers use for SET the most and do children use for SEL the most?

  3. (3)

    Is there a significant difference in the teachers’ SET and the children’s SEL as determined by the average number of utterances related to each of the CASEL 5 and to each of the identified strategies?

  4. (4)

    If and what might be the relationships among the CASEL 5 and the strategies used between the teachers’ SET and the children’s SEL?

Method

Approved by the Institutional Review Board of the principal investigator’s host institution in Hong Kong, this study was conducted in accordance with standard ethical research practices, including obtaining signed consent letters from both the research site and all participants.

Research Context and Participants

This study explored the same dataset as a previous investigation on a different topic ("teachers’ literal and inferential questions and children’s responses") (Chen & Liang, 2017). The data consisted of videotaped classroom observations in four classrooms in one Hong Kong kindergarten (operated by a religious organization) serving approximately 360 young children (ages 3–6) in both full-day and half-day programs. This kindergarten was selected because it shared typical characteristics of Hong Kong kindergartens (e.g., was privately run and non-profit, accepted fee subsidy under the governmental voucher scheme system, conducted instruction in Cantonese Chinese). The four classrooms were recommended for participation by the principal at this kindergarten. The participants were four lead teachers and 71 children from four full-day classrooms (2 K2s serving 4–5-year-olds and 2 K3s serving 5–6-year-olds). Each classroom comprised 15–20 children (M = 18 children) with approximately an equal gender distribution. The four teachers (ages 21–41 years, M = 32 years) were all female and held a Certificate of Education in Early Childhood Education as required to teach kindergarten in Hong Kong but had various teaching experiences ranging from 1 to 15 years (M = 8 years).

Procedure

A total of 20 observation sessions of whole-group instruction (representing five daily sessions in each of the four classrooms over a period of five days), all conducted in Cantonese Chinese (the main language spoken by the local populace in Hong Kong), were videotaped by a trained Chinese research assistant. These sessions totaled 433 min (90–123 min per classroom, averaging 20 min per session). Except for one observation session of shared book reading, the rest of the 19 sessions involved discussing a specific themed topic (sometimes accompanied by supplemental materials, such as pictures illustrating scenarios and actual objects). These themed topics include family, food, and animals in the zoo. We observed whole-group direct instruction because it was found to be the most dominant instructional context in typical kindergarten classrooms in Hong Kong (Chen et al., 2017; Li et al., 2012; Pearson & Rao, 2003). To enhance reliability of transcription, the first two authors fluent in Cantonese Chinese independently transcribed verbatim one random videotaped observation. Upon confirming the consistency between the two transcriptions, the authors felt comfortable delegating the remaining observations to be transcribed by the second author and reviewed by the first author.

Data Analysis

We began by coding the utterances for evidence of each of the CASEL 5. Utterances were defined as spoken word(s), statements, and questions produced by the teachers and children (Chen & Liang, 2017). For the purposes of this study, we only considered utterances that carried social and emotional content relevant to the CASEL 5 (Self-Awareness, Self-Management, Social Awareness, Relationship Skills and Responsible Decision-Making). We recognize that these five CASEL areas are not mutually exclusive. For instance, Ng and Bull (2018) categorized an instance of exercising turn-taking (based on Singapore’s national framework of SEL competencies) as an indicator of not just one but two SEL competencies (Social Awareness and Relationship Management). In this study, when two competencies were involved, one often appeared to be more contextually prominent than the other. Consequently, we would code the data according to the most salient of the two. Additionally, we conducted open coding by conceptually aligning each social and emotional utterance with a specific strategy. In the process, we identified a set of four strategies: (1) Telling/Commanding/Directing, (2) Explaining, (3) Asking Questions, and (4) Affirming/Confirming (see Table 2 for the definition of each strategy and associated example). We then tallied the total number of utterances that evidenced a particular competency and strategy from the 20 videotaped classroom observation sessions, separately for the teachers and the children, as the unit of analysis.

Table 2 Examples of the five competencies and associated teaching and learning strategies from this study
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Interrater Reliability

To ensure high interrater reliability, the first two authors (well versed with the coding schemes employed) independently coded two randomly selected transcripts, representing 10% of the 20 videotaped classroom sessions. For the first transcript on the  study topic, ‘‘Loving Family,’’ in one classroom, the agreement in coded competencies between these two authors resulted in a Cohen’s kappa value of κ = 0.79, which was substantial. To improve the agreement level, research discussions were conducted to reconcile discrepancies. Subsequently, for the second transcript on the study topic, “the Secrets of Lunchboxes,” in another classroom, the agreement of coded competencies between the two authors reached a Cohen’s kappa value of κ = 0.94. This value was within the 0.81–1.00 range considered to be “almost perfect agreement” (Landis & Koch, 1977; McHugh, 2012). This finding suggests that the interrater reliability was high in coding the competencies.

Additionally, the first two authors independently coded the same two transcripts for utterances evidencing the use of each of the five strategies. The agreement of coded strategies between the two authors for the first transcript resulted in a Cohen’s kappa value of κ = 0.99, and for the second transcript a Cohen’s kappa value of κ = 0.98. These values were all within the “almost perfect agreement” range (Landis & Koch, 1977; McHugh, 2012), suggesting high inter-rater reliability in coding the strategies.

Results

Table 3 summarizes the descriptive statistics of the aggregated number of teacher and child utterances. The results indicate that collectively, the teachers produced a total of 2819 SET-related utterances, which was about 18% more than the children’s total SEL-related utterances (n = 1945). Each utterance was also coded for a one-on-one correspondence between a SEL competency and a strategy. However, the specific combination of competency and strategy may vary from situation to situation.

Research Question #1: Which of the CASEL 5 do teachers teach the most and children learn the most?

Table 3 Descriptive statistics of the five competencies and four strategies of the teachers’ SET and children’s SEL and responses during the 20 videotaped instructional sessions
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As shown in Table 3, of all five competencies, both the teacher and child utterances evidenced Responsible Decision-Making the most, with 51% of the teachers’ SET utterances involving Responsible Decision-Making, and the majority of the children’s SEL (71%) reflecting Responsible Decision-Making. Furthermore, Fig. 1 presents visual comparisons of the percentage of utterances for each of the CASEL 5 between the teachers and the children.

Fig. 1
figure 1

The percentage of utterances for each competency by teachers and children during the 20 videotaped instructional sessions

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Research Question #2: Which strategies do teachers use for SET the most and do children use for SEL the most?

As also summarized in Table 3, among the five strategies, the teachers applied the Asking Questions strategy the most (accounting for 59% of their SET-related utterances), while the children responded with the Telling component of the Telling/Commanding/Directing (as there were no Commanding/Directing utterances) nearly exclusively (comprising 92% of their SEL-related utterances). Furthermore, Fig. 2 presents visual comparisons of the percentage of utterances for each of the five strategies between the teachers and the children.

Fig. 2
figure 2

The percentage of utterances for each strategy used by teachers and children during the 20 videotaped instructional sessions

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Research Question #3: Is there a significant difference in the teachers’ SET and the children’s SEL as determined by the average number of utterances related to each of the CASEL 5 and to each of the identified strategies?

Table 4 presents the unpaired t-test results for each competency between the teachers and the children, indicating that there were statistically significant differences in the average number of utterances only in three competencies: Self-Management, Social Awareness, and Relationship Skills. Specifically, the mean value of Self-Management for teachers (M = 7.55, SD = 8.35) was significantly higher than that for children (M = 2.60, SD = 6.08); t(38) = 2.14, p < 0.05. The mean value of Social Awareness for teachers (M = 29.80, SD = 11.51) was also significantly higher than that for children (M = 1.65, SD = 1.87); t(38) = 10.80, p < 0.001. The same was true of the mean value of Relationship Skills for teachers (M = 18.00, SD = 9.77) being significantly higher than that for children (M = 11.65, SD = 7.29); t(38) = 2.33, p < 0.05.

Furthermore, the unpaired t-test results indicate that the differences in the average number of related utterances in all of the strategies used between the teachers and the children were statistically significant. The mean value of Telling/Commanding/Directing for teachers (M = 29.55, SD = 12.09) was significantly lower than that for children (M = 89.10, SD = 28.73); t(38) = 8.54, p < 0.001. However, the mean value of Explain for teachers (M = 7.15, SD = 4.91) was significantly higher than that for children (M = 3.25, SD = 5.26); t(38) = 2.42, p < 0.05. The mean value of Asking Questions for teachers (M = 83.30, SD = 25.45) was also significantly higher than that for children (M = 3.25, SD = 5.26); t(38) = 13.74, p < 0.001. The same was true of the mean value of Affirming/Confirming for teachers (M = 20.90, SD = 8.17) being significantly higher than that for children (M = 0.70, SD = 0.86); t(38) = 11.00, p < 0.001.

Table 4 Un-paired t-tests of differences in SEL/SET competencies and strategies used between teachers and children
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Research Question #4: If and what might be the relationships among the CASEL 5 and the strategies used between the teachers’ SET and children’s SEL?

As shown in Table 5, except for Social Awareness, the teachers’ SET and the children’s SEL in the other four competencies were correlated significantly and strongly with each other: Self-Awareness (r = 0.90, p < 0.001), Self-Management(r = 0.88, p < 0.001), andResponsible Decision-Making(r = 0.74, p < 0.001), andRelationship Skills(r = 0.60, p < 0.01).

Table 5 The Pearson correlations between teachers’ SET and children’s SEL in the five competencies and between teachers’ SET strategies used and children’s SEL strategies used
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As shown in Table 6, the teachers’ use of the Asking Questions strategy was correlated positively and moderately strong with the children’s use of the Telling strategy (r = 0.55, p < 0.05), and moderately strong with the children’s use of the Explaining strategy (r = 0.50, p < 0.05). Furthermore, the teachers’ use of the Explaining strategy was correlated positively and moderately strong with the children’s use of the Explaining strategy (r = 0.49, p < 0.05), the Asking Questions strategy (r = 0.54, p < 0.05), and the Affirming/Confirming strategy (r = 0.57, p < 0.01). The teacher’s use of the Affirming/Confirming strategy was correlated positively and strongly with the children’s use of the Telling strategy (r = 0.73, p < 0.001).

Table 6 The Pearson correlations between teachers’ SET strategies used and children’s SEL strategies used
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As summarized in Table 7, there were statistically significant and positive correlations between some teachers’ SET and strategies used. Specifically, the strongest correlations were between Asking Questions and Responsible Decision-Making (r = 0.94, p < 0.001), between Affirming/Confirming and Social Awareness (r = 0.86, p < 0.001), and between Telling/Commanding/Directing and Relationship Skills (r = 0.76, p < 0.001). There were also positive, strong correlations between Relationship Skills and Telling (r = 0.76, p < 0.001), between Responsible Decision-Making and Explaining (r = 0.50, p < 0.05), and between Responsible Decision-Making and Affirming/Confirming (r = 0.48, p < 0.05), and between Telling/Commanding/Directing and Self-Awareness (r = 0.59, p < 0.01).

Table 7 The Pearson correlations between teachers’ SET in the five competencies and SET strategies used
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Table 8 shows that there were statistically significant and positive correlations between some children’s SEL and strategies used, with the strongest correlation being between Responsible Decision-Making and Telling (r = 0.88, p < 0.001), followed by strong correlations between Relationship Skills and Asking Questions (r = 0.58, p < 0.01), and between Responsible Decision-Making and Explaining (r = 0.46, p < 0.05).

Table 8 The Pearson correlations between children’s SEL in the five competencies and SEL strategies used
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Qualitative Examples of Social and Emotional Competencies and Associated Strategies

To illustrate the teachers’ SET in the competency areas and the attendant instructional strategies employed as well as the children’s SEL and associated strategies, we provide an excerpt of an interactive exchange (translated from Cantonese Chinese to English) between the teacher and children in one classroom during a themed topic about sharing. They were reading a storybook and discussing the problem and solutions related to two sisters fighting over a strawberry cake.

Teacher (describing the scenario from the illustrations/pictures): Okay. Let’s look at the pictures. It turns out that in this picture, the older sister is asking the younger sister something. It turns out that the older sister likes to eat strawberry cake a lot. The younger sister also likes to eat it too. Both of them like to eat strawberry cake, so they both try to take the strawberry cake for themselves.

Teacher: What do you think will happen? [Asking a question] [Responsible Decision-Making].Footnote 1

Children: They will fight. [Telling] [Social Awareness].

Teacher: Fight. [Affirming/Confirming] [Social Awareness].

Will they be upset? [Asking a question] [Social Awareness].

Children: Yes. [Telling] [Social Awareness].

Teacher: The strawberry cake can be destroyed. [Telling] [Responsible Decision-Making].

Is that right? [Asking a question] [Responsible Decision-Making].

Children: Yes, it can be destroyed. [Affirming/Confirming] [Responsible Decision-Making].

Teacher: All right, I will ask children who raise their hands first. [Telling/Commanding/Directing] [Self-Management].

Teacher: [Child’s name,] what do you think they should do? [Asking a question] [Responsible Decision-Making].

Child: Share. [Telling] [Responsible Decision-Making].

Teacher: Share, how, the whole cake? [Asking a question] [Responsible Decision-Making].

Another Child [calling out the answer]: Cut it in half. [Telling] [Responsible Decision-Making].

Teacher: Please raise your hands. [Telling/Commanding/Directing] [Self-Management].

Teacher: [Child’s name,] I would like to hear what you have to say. [Telling/Commanding/Directing] [Relationship Skills].

Child: Cut it in half. [Telling] [Responsible Decision-Making].

Teacher: Use a knife to cut it in half, right? [Asking a question] [Responsible Decision-Making].

Child: Yes [use a knife to cut it in half]. [Affirming/Confirming] [Responsible Decision-Making].

Teacher: That way, the older sister can have half of the cake, and the younger sister can have the other half. [Explaining] [Responsible Decision-Making] Is this the best solution to solve the problem? [Asking a question] [Responsible Decision-Making] If you think so, please give her a check mark. [Telling/Commanding/Directing] [Responsible Decision-Making].

Children [using a hand to gesture a check mark.] [Telling] [Responsible Decision-Making].

Teacher: They should share, right? [Asking a question] [Responsible Decision-Making].

Children: Yes [they should share]. [Affirming/Confirming] [Responsible Decision-Making].

Teacher: Good, the problem is solved. [Telling] [Responsible Decision-Making].

Discussion

One of the most pressing challenges confronting educators in the 21st century is how to foster social and emotional competence in children so that they may thrive academically and behaviorally, so as to be well positioned to excel later in life and contribute to social progress. Accordingly, the question of how has captured the interest of researchers for decades. Contributing to the literature and aligning with Bandura’s (1971) social learning theory, this study revealed the teachers’ SET as a mechanism for facilitating children’s engagement in the observational learning and mediation process. This social and cognitive process involved children paying attention to the teacher's utterances and behaviors (i.e., strategies used to teach or convey particular social and emotional content), remembering them as a way to learn, modeling/imitating them, and being motivated to reproduce/imitate the teacher’s utterances and behaviors. This study also represented an effort to yield understanding of the well-established concept of SEL and our proposed concept of SET in kindergarten classrooms in Hong Kong, a cultural context that has been understudied in the field of SEL. In analyzing the utterances of the teachers’ SET and the children’s SEL in terms of the CASEL 5 (CASEL, 2020), we also discovered four specific verbal strategies that characterized the manner in which the teachers and the children manifested their SET and SEL, respectively.

The Quantity and Quality of Teachers’ SET Utterances and Children’s SEL Utterances

This study revealed both the quantity (in terms of the number and percentage) and quality (in terms of the competency and strategy used) of the teachers’ SET utterances and the children’s SEL utterances. At the outset, this study revealed that overall, the teachers produced 18% more social and emotional-related utterances than the children. This finding is not surprising, especially considering that the videotaped observations were conducted during whole-group instruction dominated by teacher talk in Hong Kong kindergartens (Chen & Liang, 2017). Given the nature of teacher-directed instruction, it would be reasonable to expect the teachers to engage in mostly Telling and Explaining related to essential concepts and topics of discussion during SET. However, contrary to this expectation, the finding revealed that Asking Questions (59%) actually occupied the preponderance of the teachers’ SET utterances. It was corroborated by the qualitative extract presented in the Results section. It may be because Asking Questions is the most optimal means to engage children in discussion and conversation to promote language learning and gauge children’s understanding (Chen & de Groot Kim, 2014; Chen & Liang, 2017).

The finding of children’s SEL-related utterances involving primarily Telling, limitedly Asking Questions, Explaining, and Affirming/Confirming suggests that children spoke mostly in response to the questions asked by their teachers. Furthermore, the difference in the average utterances involving each of these strategies between the teachers and children was proven statistically significant. While the teachers utilized all four identified strategies (Asking Questions, Explaining, Affirming/Confirming, and Telling/Commanding/Directing) significantly more than the children, the children used the Telling response significantly more than the teachers. This finding may be attributed to the teacher-directed nature of instruction as well as Chinese cultural values emphasizing reverence for authority and discipline requiring child obedience and attention (Chen, 2005; Chen et al., 2017; Pearson & Rao, 2003). That is, the children only spoke in response to the questions asked by the teacher, as the authority in the classroom.

Another salient finding is that although teacher and child utterances reflected CASEL 5, they were not all created equal, as evident in their unequal attention demonstrated. In particular, of all five competencies, Responsible Decision-Making was the most prominent in both the teachers’ SET and children’s SEL. In fact, there was no statistically significant difference found in the average number of utterances related to Responsible Decision-Making between the teachers and children. Furthermore, Responsible Decision-Making in teachers’ SET was positively and strongly correlated with that in the children’s SEL. This finding suggests that children might have observed, modeled, and imitated the teachers’ Responsible Decision-Making behavior in talk. On the one hand, this evidence corroborates the finding of Ng and Sun’s (2022) study revealing the alignment between Singaporean teachers’ SEL strategies and children’s SEL responses. On the other hand, given that Responsible Decision-Making could be interpersonal or intrapersonal in nature, the finding does not seem to echo Ng and Sun’s finding that teachers facilitated more interpersonal than intrapersonal learning. In fact, perhaps because Responsible Decision-Making could occur in both interpersonal and intrapersonal scenarios, such as in social situations and dilemmas involving making constructive decisions concerning either personal actions or social interactions, it might have provided the teachers more opportunities to scaffold this competency in children and the children more contexts to articulate their responses related to Responsible Decision-Making. The finding could also be context-specific in that the topics of discussion might have lent themselves to more Responsible Decision-Making relevant exchanges between teachers and children as demonstrated by the qualitative except. Another contextual explanation is rooted in the Chinese culture's emphasis on social harmony and moral development, and thereby adults' efforts to instill these cultural values in children during the socialization process (Chen, 2005, 2019). Thus, it seems logical for Responsible Decision-Making to be prominent in both the teachers’ SET and the children’s SEL.

Relationships Among Social and Emotional Competencies and Associated Strategies

This study revealed that in terms of teacher utterances, four of the five competencies (Self-Awareness, Social Awareness, Relationship Skills, and Responsible Decision-Making) were correlated with at least one of the four strategies (Telling/Commanding/Directing, Explaining, Asking Questions, Affirming/Confirming, and Commanding/Directing). A closer examination of the teacher utterances produced reveals that there was at least 10% of the utterances devoted to each of these four competencies, suggesting that this percentage might have served as the threshold of sufficient opportunities for the teachers to apply SET-related strategies for children to reap SEL benefits. In contrast, this study also revealed that Self-Management was not associated with any of the teachers’ SET strategies. This finding makes sense in that the teachers engaged in Self-Management the least, accounting for only 5% of the total utterances, which apparently was not enough to reach the threshold of opportunities for fostering this SEL competency in children.

With respect to the children, there were only three significant correlations found related to their SEL and associated strategies used: (1) Responsible Decision-Making was correlated most strongly with Telling, (2) Responsible Decision-Making was correlated modestly strong with Explaining, and (3) Relationship Skills was associated modestly strong with Asking Questions. These findings suggest that the children were given the most opportunities to devote to SEL in the areas of Responsible Decision-Making and Relationship Skills through Telling, Asking Questions and Explaining, especially considering that the highest percentage of child utterances involved Telling (92% of the total utterances) followed by Asking Questions (4% of the total utterances) and Explaining (3% of the total utterances). Thus, similar to the relationships between the teachers’ SET and strategies used, the finding about the children’s SEL and Telling, Asking Questions, and Explaining strategies used also point to opportunities (e.g., the cultural context, the topics of discussion) for possibly the application of competencies and strategies being matter the most in determining which ones would emerge more prominently.

Relationships Among Teachers’ SET and Strategies, and Children’s SEL and Strategies

Except for Social Awareness, the teachers’ SET and the children’s SEL in the other four competencies (Self-Awareness, Self-Management, Relationship Skills, and Responsible Decision-Making) were correlated strongly or moderately strong in the positive direction. This finding may be interpreted from two perspectives: (1) the teaching–learning concordance, and (2) a teaching–learning opportunity gap. The first interpretation highlights that the concordance between the teachers’ SET and the children’s SEL in the four competencies may reflect the effect of teacher modeling as being concentrated more heavily on these areas and subsequently mirrored in the children’s SEL. This finding aligns with that of previous studies, suggesting that teachers are in a unique position to teach new skills and reinforce learned ones using various strategies to add threads to help young children weave their own SEL fabric (e.g., Chen & Adams, 2023; Chen & Badolato, 2023; Chen & O’Donnell, 2022; Ng & Sun, 2022). Thus, it is plausible that what the teachers emphasized in their teaching might have elicited the children’s responses in kind as reflecting Bandura’s (1971) idea of social learning.

The second interpretation points to a teacher-learning opportunity gap. That is, not all competencies in the teachers’ SET correlated with those in the children’s SEL. For instance, the teachers’ SET in Social Awareness (accounting for 21% of the total utterances) was not correlated with the children’s SEL (comprising only 2% of their utterances) in Social Awareness. It may be because 2% was not enough to reach the threshold of sufficient opportunities for children to engage in utterances involving Social Awareness. Furthermore, overwhelmingly, 92% of the children’s utterances involved Telling. Yet, Telling and Social Awareness were not significantly correlated, a finding that might suggest a lack of opportunities for children to engage in Telling related to Social Awareness.

The finding of children’s Asking Questions being correlated positively with teachers’ Telling and with teachers’ Explaining, suggests that the more questions the children asked, the more Telling and Explaining might have been required of the teachers. Another interesting, but perhaps not surprising, finding is that the teachers’ Affirming/Confirming strategy was strongly and positively correlated with the children’s Telling response. It may be because the children’s utterances, typically in response to the teachers’ questions, subsequently elicited the teachers’ affirmation or confirmation. The teachers’ Explaining being positively correlated with the children’s Explaining, Asking Questions and Affirming/Confirming is also perhaps not surprising because the teachers’ SET involving the use of Explaining might have served as a model for children to engage in the following ways: (1) Explaining when questions were asked of them, (2) Asking Questions for teacher clarification, or (3) Affirming/Confirming the teachers’ explanations in solving social and emotional situations presented to them.

The findings revealing the correlations among the teachers’ SET and strategies and the children’s SEL and strategies corroborate the idea that as social interaction involves using language to communicate, by asking socially- and emotionally-related questions, the teachers can engage children as conversational partners including eliciting their SEL-related responses, questions, and reactions (Chen & Adams, 2023; Chen & Badolato, 2023; Morris et al., 2013; Yoder, 2014). Furthermore, considering that teaching and learning are a complex, culturally-entwining activity (Stigler & Hiebert, 1999), the findings concerning the strategies employed may be best understood from a cultural perspective. Particularly, as Hong Kong is rooted in traditional Chinese culture that values teacher authority and child obedience (Chen, 2005; Chen et al., 2017; Pearson & Rao, 2003), children might have only spoken in response to teachers’ questions, potentially leading to the teachers’ affirmation or confirmation of their responses. In this case, through social learning (Bandura, 1971), the children might have observed, modeled, and imitated the teachers’ behaviors during their SET.

In conclusion, as life is full of social and emotional challenges, it is imperative that children build SEL-related capacities to constructively address these challenges to attain lifelong success. Thus, SEL should continue to constitute as a nucleus of a high-quality and equitable early childhood education that equips children with not only academic skills, but also social and emotional competence as a foundational aspect of the “whole child” development. Our investigation represents an intentional effort to sketch a portrait of the ways in which instances of the teachers’ effective SET were seemingly reflected in children’s SEL, potentially serving as evidence of social learning at work. We hope that this study paves the way for similar research endeavors to be conducted further in Hong Kong and in other understudied cultural contexts to contribute additional theoretical and empirical knowledge to the field of SEL in the future.

Educational Implications

The findings of this study yield theoretical and empirical contributions to inform policy and practice in three ways. First, at the theoretical level, we propose the explicit inclusion of the specific concept, SET, in research on SEL. Second, as discovered, there are specific strategies associated with the extent to which each social and emotional competency may be learned or taught. Third, the analysis of teacher and child utterances reveals that although the whole-group instructional lessons observed in this study were not centered on explicitly teaching social and emotional skills, the discussions initiated by the teachers did carry social and emotional content. This finding attests that social and emotional manifestations are an organic human experience, and thus, are likely to present themselves as a natural occurrence in teacher–child interactions. This perspective suggests that teacher–child interactions provide an invaluable context for children’s SEL to flourish.

Furthermore, building social and emotional skills is like weaving a fabric, with each skill learned adding a new thread, thereby making the fabric stronger. The findings of this study solidify the importance of social learning in the different competency areas and associated conversational strategies as adding threads to help children weave their own SEL fabric. One apparent implication from the findings is that children need opportunities to build their social and emotional repertoire and engage in developmentally appropriate manifestations of their SEL. Teachers are in a unique position to provide such opportunities to children by ways, such as actively engaging them in discussions using multiple strategies and incorporating SEL organically into their daily learning activities to help children develop, practice, and hone their various social and emotional skills in all learning contexts (Chen & Adams, 2023; Chen & Badolato, 2023; McClelland et al., 2017). In particular, young children’s social and emotional development has been found to flourish in the context of nurturing learning environments, child-initiated play, and positive teacher–child relationships (Kirk & Jay, 2018). Teachers can also facilitate children’s SEL in interactive activities in the classroom throughout the school day (Ng & Bull, 2018).

As highlighted earlier, although SEL has been advocated in the policy document of kindergarten education reform in Hong Kong (the Curriculum Development Council, 2017), there appears no explicit widespread policy guidance on the integration of SEL in the curriculum and teaching practice (Wu & Mok, 2017). To put policy into practice, it is incumbent upon education authority in Hong Kong to provide teachers with opportunities for professional learning to better model social and emotional behaviors to help foster children’s SEL intentionally and explicitly. The findings of this study suggest that the prominence of using certain SET and SEL strategies (e.g., teacher asking questions and children telling in response) appears akin to the Chinese cultural value of emphasizing children’s respect for and obedience to authority figures.

Limitations of the Study and Directions for Future Research

The findings of this study contribute new insights to the SEL field, especially as the first of its kind that examined teachers’ SET and children’s SEL in kindergarten classrooms in Hong Kong—an understudied cultural context. Nonetheless, this study has conceptual and methodological limitations. Conceptually, in the absence of a SEL framework specifically for this cultural context, we employed the popular CASEL 5 originated in the United States. We recognize that this framework might not fully capture the unique richness and complexity of Chinese culture that influences teacher–child interactions in Hong Kong. Thus, more research is merited to further examine SET and SEL there by potentially developing a culturally-specific framework to validate the findings of this study.

There are also methodological limitations that should be considered in future research. First, the relatively small sample size and the unique contextual characteristics of the participants in this study may limit the generalizability of its findings to potentially only populations situated in similar cultural and instructional contexts. Second, we categorized the teacher and child utterances as reflecting four strategies. More research is warranted to validate this newly established coding scheme of strategies. Third, the findings may reflect the content embedded in the general themed topics of instruction. For instance, the social dilemmas discussed might have lent themselves to invoke Responsible Decision-Making more, leading this competency to be the most prominent in both SET and SEL. Future research focusing on other none-thematic topics, social scenarios, or teaching–learning contexts beyond whole-group instruction might reveal new or additional insights to complement or supplement those of this study. Fourth, we focused only on verbal strategies that the teachers and children used. Future research might also examine non-verbal strategies. Fifth, as there was not always an appropriate correspondence between the teachers’ SET and children’s SEL or between teachers and children in the use of strategies, future research might venture into exploring why certain instances of teachers’ SET or strategies used were not effective in eliciting children’s SEL and related strategies in kind. Another methodological limitation is that this study relied solely on videotaped observations, future research might consider triangulating the observation data with other methods, such as interviewing teachers about their perspectives on their SET and children’s SEL. Such methodological triangulation may yield additional insights not found in this study.