Understanding the Well-Being Literacy of EFL Learners: Towards a Framework of Learners’ Knowledge and Skills

Well-being has been recognized as a basic human right, a core determinant of success in education, and a skill that can be developed. In language education, the literature suggests that higher well-being is likely to lead to more classroom engagement and ultimately greater success for learners. For English language teachers, there is a need to understand what learners know about well-being, what kinds of support they feel they need, and how best to integrate such support into regular language teaching practice. This paper reports on a qualitative study using focus group data that set out to understand the well-being literacy of a group of 42 Austrian learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) in their final year of school. The findings reveal five categories in which learners demonstrated knowledge of well-being: conceptual understanding of well-being, factors impacting well-being, coping strategies, the role of systemic factors, and issues in the English language teaching context specifically. Based on analysis of these data, we present an initial practical framework for evaluating and guiding EFL student well-being literacy development.