Prosocial Language Arts

The term language arts refers to the subjects that aim to develop students’ capacities to understand and use language. Here, we will focus on the core components of language arts, reading and writing, which provide ample opportunities to integrate prosocial development into the academic curriculum.

Reading Instruction

Prosocial instruction in reading involves emphasizing social-emotional and ethical themes, analysis, and experience when reading literature or other forms of texts with students. Using a prosocial lens in literacy learning can help students better understand themselves and others, examine moral dilemmas, and encourage them to practice compassion and other prosocial qualities in their everyday lives.

While reading aloud to his students, an elementary school teacher helps students become emotionally transported into stories by encouraging them to imagine what characters are seeing, hearing, touching, and so on. After reading, he pauses to discuss social-emotional questions that have arisen in the story, such as how characters are feeling and why, the reasons characters are behaving in a certain way, or how a character’s actions affect others.

A high school English teacher, when teaching literary fiction or life narratives, gives students the opportunity to think about and discuss the thoughts and feelings of people who may have very different experiences than their own, or who may offer new perspectives on familiar experiences. She then prompts students to make connections between issues in the text and in their own communities, and to think about how they could act to help.

Writing Instruction

Applying a prosocial lens in writing instruction can involve using writing to further examine and discuss prosocial themes in texts that students have read; especially in older grades, the teaching of writing is often integrated with literary analysis.

However, writing—especially in the form of narratives or poetry—can also offer students a unique chance to explore and express their own feelings, life experiences, and values.

At the beginning of the school year, high schoolers in English class are asked to write briefly about their most important values. As the year goes on, for each text they read, their teacher asks them to write a response identifying the main character’s central values, how these values influence the character’s actions, and how these values are similar to and different from their own.

As part of a poetry unit, a middle school teacher has her class read several poems that include descriptions of different emotional experiences. In addition to analyzing the technical features of the poems, they discuss the emotional qualities of each one, and students write responses about how one or more of the poems produces an emotional effect. Then, students are assigned to write their own poems about an emotional experience in their lives that they are willing to share, and are each given the opportunity to perform their poem for the class if they would like.