Emotional-literacy ESP lesson boosted communication and leadership skills

A design-based ESP lesson for psychology undergrads increased emotional vocabulary, engagement, and confident professional dialogue.

An ESP lesson explicitly teaching emotional literacy produced stronger emotional engagement, clearer emotion vocabulary, and better interpersonal communication in psychology students. Qualitative evidence also pointed to increased communicative confidence and emerging leadership traits during role-play, including responsiveness, attentiveness, and emotional regulation. The work positions emotional literacy as a practical leadership competency that can be trained inside professional English instruction.

Quick summary

What the study found: An interdisciplinary ESP lesson design (“Feelings and Emotions”) was associated with strong engagement, improved emotional vocabulary awareness, better interpersonal communication, and signs of leadership behavior in simulated dialogues.
Why it matters: Training emotional literacy inside language learning may prepare psychology students for emotionally demanding roles where both words and regulation shape outcomes.
What to be careful about: The evidence is qualitative and tied to one DBR lesson design in one context; the abstract does not report comparative outcomes or long-term transfer.

What was found

The journal article Integrating emotional literacy into leadership-oriented ESP teaching: a case of psychology students describes an interdisciplinary lesson design aimed at building emotional literacy as part of leadership competencies for psychology students. The research used a design-based research (DBR) approach, emphasizing iterative testing of a teaching innovation in a real academic setting. The focal intervention was an ESP lesson titled “Feelings and Emotions,” delivered to psychology undergraduates in 2025.

The lesson combined multiple activity types: authentic multimedia, case-based discussion, guided reflection, task-based writing, and interactive role-play. Qualitative data sources included student responses, formative assessments, observation notes, and reflection logs. Across these sources, the author reports strong emotional engagement, enhanced awareness of emotional vocabulary, and improved interpersonal communication.

Students demonstrated analytical reasoning about complex emotions, including terms like “envy,” “benign envy,” and “ennui,” and used technical terminology with precision. In simulated professional dialogues, students practiced empathetic listening. During role-play, the study observed increased communicative confidence and emergent leadership traits—specifically responsiveness, attentiveness, and emotional regulation.

Student essays were also used as evidence. According to the abstract, essays showed students synthesizing personal experience with core theoretical ideas, suggesting progress toward both linguistic self-awareness and emotional self-awareness. The study frames its novelty as a lesson design that intentionally integrates emotional intelligence development with leadership-focused communication training inside professional English for psychology students, situated in Ukraine.

What it means

The practical takeaway is straightforward: emotional literacy can be taught as a language-and-leadership skill rather than treated as an “extra” soft skill outside the curriculum. In emotionally intensive professions, communication is rarely just information transfer; it’s also affect management—naming feelings accurately, interpreting others’ cues, and choosing responses that keep a conversation workable. A lesson that forces repeated practice with emotion terms and emotion-laden scenarios can make those skills visible and trainable.

This study’s outcomes align with a common principle in skills training: people improve faster when they practice the exact behaviors they will need under realistic constraints. Here, those behaviors include precise labeling of emotions, empathic listening, and regulated responding—paired with the additional load of doing it in professional English. If students can discuss nuanced affect (for example, distinguishing envy from benign envy) while staying coherent and socially attuned, that is closer to real clinical, educational, or organizational conversations than generic language drills.

The leadership angle matters because leadership is often enacted through micro-behaviors: noticing what’s happening emotionally, responding without escalation, and helping a group stay oriented to a task. The abstract’s reported “emergent leadership traits” in role-play—responsiveness, attentiveness, emotional regulation—map onto what many leadership frameworks treat as foundational interpersonal competence. The implication is not that a single lesson “creates leaders,” but that leadership-relevant communication can be rehearsed, observed, and shaped in structured learning activities.

Where it fits

Many psychology programs already teach emotion concepts theoretically, while language courses often prioritize general fluency or academic writing. This lesson design sits in the overlap: it treats emotional vocabulary as a professional tool and uses communication tasks that resemble work situations. That integration makes sense for psychology students because their future roles can involve de-escalation, rapport building, and careful wording under stress.

The teaching approach described also fits established ideas from experiential learning and reflective practice: learners take in material (multimedia), analyze cases, try a skill (role-play and writing), and then reflect. The abstract reports reflection logs and guided reflection as part of the design, which supports the broader notion that naming an internal state is easier when learners have structured prompts and feedback. In language learning terms, this is also consistent with task-based practice: students use language to complete realistic tasks rather than memorize isolated words.

The design-based research framing matters because DBR is about building workable educational interventions in real settings, refining them based on what happens. That makes the project especially relevant to educators who need tools that function in the messy reality of classrooms. At the same time, DBR often prioritizes design utility over clean causal claims, which affects how confidently we can generalize outcomes beyond the described setting.

How to use it

If you teach ESP, clinical communication, counseling skills, or any psychology-adjacent course, the transferable idea is to make emotional literacy a visible learning objective with observable behaviors. That means defining what “good” looks like: accurate emotion labeling, appropriate intensity words, reflective listening that captures both content and affect, and regulated responses under pressure. Then build activities that force those behaviors repeatedly, with feedback.

Start by building an emotion vocabulary ladder: basic emotions, nuanced variants, and professionally relevant descriptors. The abstract highlights complex emotion terms, suggesting value in moving beyond “sad/angry/happy” to more discriminating language. Pair vocabulary with short case prompts so words are always attached to context, not memorized in isolation.

Use role-play deliberately, not as free-form improv. Give students roles with competing needs and emotional stakes, and require specific communication moves: naming the emotion, checking understanding, and responding with empathy while staying task-focused. The study reports that role-play revealed greater confidence and leadership-related behaviors; to replicate that, keep role-play structured, brief, and repeatable, and rotate roles so students practice both expressing and receiving emotion.

Build reflection into the workflow, not after the fact. Guided reflection logs can ask students to identify which emotion words they used, what they avoided, where they escalated or regulated, and what they would rephrase. This supports metacognition: learners start to recognize their default patterns, which is a prerequisite for changing them in real professional encounters.

Finally, connect emotion talk to theory without turning it into a lecture. The abstract notes that student essays synthesized personal experience with core theoretical ideas; you can prompt that by asking students to anchor one observed interaction pattern to a concept they already know. This keeps the work professional and reduces the risk of reflection becoming unstructured disclosure.

Limits & what we still don’t know

The evidence reported in the abstract is qualitative and drawn from student responses, formative assessments, observation notes, and reflection logs. That’s useful for understanding classroom process and perceived change, but it does not establish how much improvement occurred compared to other lesson designs or to a control condition. The abstract also does not report whether gains persisted over time or transferred to real-world settings beyond simulated dialogues.

We also don’t know how broadly the lesson generalizes across instructors, cohorts, or institutions. The intervention was delivered to psychology undergraduates in 2025, and the novelty claim is tied to the context of professional English education for psychology students in Ukraine; that context may shape student motivation, curriculum constraints, and baseline proficiency. The abstract doesn’t specify which elements were most responsible for change—multimedia, case discussions, reflection, writing, role-play, or the combination—so educators should treat the package as an integrated design rather than assume any single component will reproduce the same effects.

Another open question is measurement: “improved interpersonal communication” and “emergent leadership traits” are meaningful claims, but the abstract doesn’t describe standardized metrics or behavioral coding beyond what was captured in qualitative materials. That doesn’t invalidate the classroom observations; it simply limits how precisely we can quantify outcomes or compare them across settings. Future work would need clearer performance criteria and follow-up to test durability and transfer.

Closing takeaway

This study supports a pragmatic idea: if you want psychology students to communicate like professionals, teach emotional literacy inside the language tasks they actually perform. A carefully designed ESP lesson can prompt students to name complex emotions accurately, listen empathically, and regulate responses while speaking professionally. Treat emotional vocabulary and regulated dialogue as trainable competencies, then practice them in cases, writing, and role-play where feedback is immediate and specific.

Data in this article is provided by Semantic Scholar.

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