Introduction

A burgeoning body of research demonstrates that bilingual children may go through different developmental routes, showing advantages in cognitive skills (e.g., Barac et al. 2014; Bialystok 2015; Sun 2023), metalinguistic awareness (e.g., Adesope et al. 2010), and third language learning (e.g., Cenoz 2013; Hirosh and Degani 2018) attributed to their dual language experience. Previous studies have predominantly focused on the benefits of bilingualism in the above domains, with less attention given to the association between second language (L2) learning and social competence.

Social competence refers to a series of abilities capable of making flexible and appropriate responses in social interactions (Rose-Krasnor 1997). It is the foundation of human behaviors and thoughts, playing an essential role in building and maintaining relationships, communicating with others, and participating in social interactions (Cacioppo 2002). The latest research has found that people with higher social competence have larger brain volumes, and frequent participation in social activity was significantly associated with prolonged overall survival in older people (Wang et al. 2023). For children, those with better social competence have an easier time adjusting to school at an early age and achieve better results when they enter kindergarten (e.g., Denham 2006; Rhoades et al. 2011), possessing more psychological well-being (Aneesh et al. 2024). Conversely, those with poor social competence are more likely to experience peer difficulties, emotional dysregulation, and poor academic performance (e.g., Liu et al. 2023; Ren et al. 2016; Rose-Krasnor 1997).

Multiple factors influence the development of social competence, as proposed in most theoretical models (e.g., Beauchamp and Anderson 2010; Frith and Frith 2012; Soto-Icaza et al. 2015). Among these models, the biopsychosocial Socio-Cognitive Integration of Abilities model (SOCIAL; Beauchamp and Anderson 2010) has been extensively studied and well supported by empirical evidence in early childhood research (e.g., Tuerk et al. 2021). SOCIAL integrates the biological basics and social-cognitive skills that underlie social functioning (attention/executive function, communication, social-emotional skills) as well as the internal and external factors that mediate these skills in the context of social brain networks (Beauchamp and Anderson 2010).

One of the most concerned cognitive factors in SOCIAL is language ability, which serves as the solid foundation of social communication (Beauchamp and Anderson 2010). It is an exceedingly significant social tool learned and developed through interactions with others (Vygotsky 1962), and children’s use of language in interactions with various interlocutors is the primary means for them to grow in both linguistic and social competence (Sun 2023). Empirical evidence has demonstrated a positive link between language ability and social competence in typically developing children (e.g., Bornstein et al. 1998; Dağal 2017; Jurkic et al. 2023; Longoria et al. 2009; Longobardi et al. 2015, 2016; Monopoli and Kingston 2012; Nærland 2011; Ren et al. 2016) and children with specific language impairment (Gertner et al. 1994; Hart et al. 2004; Laws et al. 2012; Marton et al. 2005; McCabe and Meller 2004; see Botting and Conti-Ramsden 2008; Wolters et al. 2014 for the evidence in adolescents). For instance, studies have manifested that children prefer to interact with peers who have typical or above-average receptive vocabulary skills (Gertner et al. 1994). Receptive language ability is also associated with some prosocial behaviors such as comforting, empathizing, cooperating, and helping others (Cassidy et al. 2003; Longoria et al. 2009). Furthermore, functional MRI (fMRI) studies have indicated common activations in the left superior temporal sulcus (STS) for language and social information processing (e.g., Redcay 2008; Yang et al. 2015), suggesting a shared neural region for language and social interaction.

Fewer studies, however, have been attentive to the relationship between L2 ability and social competence in bilingual children. The few studies that look into the relationship were carried out in the context of L2 (mostly English) being the societally dominant language (e.g., Chen and Tse 2010; Ren et al. 2016; Sun et al. 2021). These studies claim that L2 ability is positively associated with children’s social competence. Specifically, as children’s L2 proficiency improves, so does their ability in social communication. For instance, Chinese-English bilingual preschoolers in Australia with higher L2 (i.e., English) proficiency exhibited higher levels of social competence, such as more prosocial behaviors, more physical independence, and better adaptability (e.g., Goldfeld et al. 2014; Ren et al. 2016; Ren and Wyver 2016). Similar results were found in preschoolers with diverse native languages in Switzerland and Germany (Jurkic et al. 2023). In an older age group, i.e., Chinese-English bilingual primary school students in Canada and the US, their L2 ability was found to be positively associated with peer-rated interpersonal relationships, teacher-rated social competence, and a sense of self-worth. In contrast, those who were less proficient in English were more likely to perform poorly in social competence, displaying anxiety, irritability, and hyperactivity (Chen and Tse 2010; Han 2010; Han and Huang 2010). In general, L2 ability is related to the comprehension of cultural values and social interactions (Halle et al. 2014; Sun 2023). In the context of L2 being the societally dominant language, bilingualism benefits children’s social-emotional health, thereby facilitating their communication with peers (Chen and Tse 2010; Han 2010; Sun et al. 2021; Sun 2023) and teachers (Ren and Wyver 2016), and helping them feel more comfortable and accepted at school (Goldfeld et al. 2014; Han 2010; Han and Huang 2010; Ren et al. 2016).

In addition to the specificality of the societal language contexts, the empirical evidence on the relationship between L2 ability and social competence predominantly comes from preschoolers (e.g., Ren et al. 2016; Ren and Wyver 2016; Sun et al. 2021) and primary school students (e.g., Chen and Tse 2010; Chen et al. 2014; Han 2010; Han and Huang 2010) in English-speaking countries. However, social competence undergoes an evolutionary process from infancy to adolescence (Junge et al. 2020). Adolescence (ages 12–18) is another critical period in the maturation of perspective skills and identity formation (Moffitt 1993; Weiss 1986). In China, where English is studied as a foreign language (EFL), whether the relationship between foreign language ability and social competence also exists in adolescents is still an open question.

Therefore, the current study aims to investigate the relationship between foreign language achievement and social competence in an older age group in a non-English-speaking country, i.e., Chinese EFL adolescents. Since previous research has found the modulating effect of emotional factors on the relationship between intrinsic/extrinsic behaviors and English learning performance (e.g., Liu et al. 2024; Ren et al. 2016; Wang and Liu 2024), the current study considers emotion regulation as a modulating factor to examine the role of emotion regulation on the relationship between social competence and foreign language achievement. Besides, cognitive factors like non-verbal intelligence were also found to affect bilinguals’ language development (Sun 2019), allowing children to reorganize and analyze novel linguistic patterns (Daller and Ongun 2017). The current study considers non-verbal intelligence as a control variable. As a reference, native language (i.e., Mandarin Chinese) achievement is also taken into account. We hypothesize that (a) foreign language (i.e., English) achievement is positively correlated with and predicts social competence in Chinese EFL adolescents; (b) emotion regulation modulates the relationship between foreign language achievement and social competence.

Methods

Participants

A total of 103 Chinese EFL adolescents (49 boys and 54 girls) participated in this study. They were all typically developing adolescents with no serious chronic health problems or mental retardation. The adolescents were recruited from a junior high school in Northern China and ranged in age from 12 to 14 years (M = 12.93, SD = 0.32). Signed informed consent was obtained from the participants.

Data collection and measures

All seventh-grade adolescents in the junior high school were eligible to participate. A total of 150 questionnaires were sent out, 141 forms (94%) were returned, and of those, 103 (73.05%) were considered valid if they were completed and did not contain convergent answers. Adolescents’ social competence, emotion regulation, non-verbal intelligence, and language achievement were assessed with standardized measures. The following section provides details of the measures. Each participant filled out the questionnaire based on their actual situation.

Language achievement

Participants’ scores in their final English and Mandarin Chinese examinations were used as the indicators of their foreign and native language achievement, which were considered comprehensive reflections of the participants’ ability in language development and learning. Since all the participants took part in the same exams at the same school, their scores were considered comparable interpersonally and interinstitutionally. The exams were designed based on the national curriculum standards for compulsory education (Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China 2022). Both exams had a total score of 120 points, testing skills in vocabulary, reading comprehension, and writing (English achievement: M = 92.19, SD = 20.72; Mandarin Chinese achievement: M = 91.99, SD = 10.49).

Social competence

The subscale “social competence” of the Self-Perception Profile for Adolescents (SPPA; Harter 2012) was used to assess the adolescents’ social competence. There were 5 items, and each item consisted of two sentences, such as “Some teenagers find it hard to make friends” and “Other teenagers find it pretty easy to make friends.” The questions were translated into Chinese and checked by two researchers who were fluent in English and had rich experience in the field of developmental psychology. The revised items in Chinese were judged to be true to their intended meaning in English. Subsequently, the adolescents were requested to select the kind of teenagers they mostly resembled, either those described on the left or those described on the right in each statement. Next, the adolescents were asked to estimate whether the description on the side they chose was “Really True for Me” or “Sort of True for Me.” The scores of each item were calculated according to the scoring principles in SPPA (Harter 2012), with scores ranging from 1 to 4, representing the lowest to the highest level of social competence. The summary scores of 5 items represent the overall social competence of adolescents. The entire list of 5 items and scoring principles can be found as Supplementary Fig. S1 online. This subscale has been reported with good reliability and validity in previous studies (e.g., Zhang et al. 2012). Cronbach’s alpha for the subscale in the present study was 0.76.

Non-verbal intelligence

The Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices Test (Raven 1976; shortened version, Bilker et al. 2012) was used as a non-verbal measure of adolescents’ general cognitive ability. This test has been extensively used across a variety of settings worldwide as a culture-fair instrument of non-verbal intelligence (Sun 2019). The test consisted of 5 incomplete matrices. In each case, the adolescents were provided with an incomplete puzzle and asked to choose one out of nine pieces to complete the puzzle. The items were arranged in a manner that permitted the assessment of consistency in the adolescents’ reasoning abilities, specifically with regard to their use of analogy and inference skills. The total score of each participant was calculated (1 for a correct answer and 0 for an incorrect one; Raven 1976).

Emotion regulation

The Emotion Regulation Questionnaire for Child and Adolescence (ERQ-CA; Gullone and Taffe 2012) was employed to assess the emotion regulation strategies of the participants, which has shown good reliability and validity in Chinese adolescents (e.g., Chen et al. 2016; Gong et al. 2022). The questionnaire is a 10-item measure with a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (completely disagree) to 5 (completely agree), assessing cognitive reappraisal (CR, 6 items) and expressive suppression (ES, 4 items). Cognitive reappraisal is a cognitive change strategy that involves redefining a potentially emotion-eliciting situation in such a way that its emotional impact is changed, and expressive suppression represents a form of response modulation involving the inhibition of ongoing emotion-expressive behavior (Gullone and Taffe 2012). Higher scores on each scale indicate greater use of the corresponding strategy. Cronbach’s alphas for the subscales of CR and ES in the present study were 0.76 and 0.66, respectively.

Data analysis

Analyses for common method bias, descriptive statistics, and bivariate correlations were carried out in SPSS version 26. Then, we estimated hierarchical regression equations to verify the predictive effects of emotion regulation and language achievement on social competence after controlling the effects of age, gender, and non-verbal intelligence. Finally, the modulation effect of emotion regulation on the relationship between foreign language achievement and social competence in Chinese EFL adolescents was also examined.

Results

Common method bias

In addition to the anonymity and confidentiality of all data that were emphasized to each participant during the questionnaire-filling instruction, common method bias (Podsakoff et al. 2003) was carried out to ensure the validity of the self-reports. The results revealed that there were three factors with eigenvalues greater than 1 without rotation, and the cumulative variance explained by the first factor was 37.80%, which was less than the critical value of 40%, indicating that there was no serious common method bias problem.

Descriptive statistics and bivariate correlations

As illustrated in Table 1, social competence correlated positively with the strategy of cognitive reappraisal in emotion regulation and English achievement. Mandarin Chinese achievement and English achievement were positively related to each other. The results also showed a significant correlation between non-verbal intelligence and achievement in both languages. There was also a significant correlation between gender and social competence.

Table 1 Descriptive statistics and bivariate correlations.
Full size table

L2 achievement and emotion regulation as predictors of social competence

Hierarchical regressions of the social competence were conducted from Step 1, with the control factors (i.e., gender, age, and non-verbal intelligence). Because there was no correlation between expressive suppression and English achievement, expressive suppression was not included as a predictor of social competence. Therefore, in Step 2, English achievement and cognitive reappraisal were selected as the main predictors. The overall effects of the control factors in Step 1 were significant only for gender, β = −0.233, SE = 0.711, t = −2.360, p = 0.02 < 0.05. After we controlled the effects of control factors, the overall effects of the main predictors of English achievement (ΔF (1, 98) = 4.852; ΔR2 = 0.044; β = 0.224; SE = 0.018; t = 2.203; p = 0.03 < 0.05) and cognitive reappraisal (ΔF (1, 97) = 15.323; ΔR2 = 0.122; β = 0.362; SE = 0.065; t = 3.915; p < 0.001) in Step 2 were significant for social competence, respectively.

Emotion regulation as a modulator

Hierarchical regression equations were estimated in these outcome variables from Step 1, with gender as the control variable; Step 2, cognitive reappraisal, expressive suppression and English achievement; and Step 3, cognitive reappraisal × English achievement and expressive suppression × English achievement for the outcome variable social competence as no control factors or Mandarin Chinese achievement affected it. The full regression equation explained 29.3% of the total variance in social competence. Both cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression had a statistically significant interaction with English achievement in Table 2, demonstrating a modulating effect of emotion regulation between English achievement and social competence.

Table 2 Standardized coefficients and explained variance for hierarchical regression equations predicting composites.
Full size table

Post hoc probing (Holmbeck 2002) of the modulation effect was conducted among the two significant interactions. The results indicated that both strategies of emotion regulation modulated the relationship between English achievement and social competence (see Fig. 1). The influence of English achievement on social competence decreased with the increasing use of the cognitive reappraisal strategy to regulate emotions. However, English achievement was highly associated with higher social competence when the use of the expressive suppression strategy to regulate emotions was reduced.

Fig. 1: The modulation effect of emotion regulation.
Fig. 1: The modulation effect of emotion regulation.The alternative text for this image may have been generated using AI.
Full size image

a shows that cognitive reappraisal modulates the relationship between English achievement and social competence, and b shows that expressive suppression modulates the relationship between English achievement and social competence.

Discussion

This study aims to reveal the relationship between foreign language achievement and social competence in Chinese adolescent EFL learners. Our results demonstrate that foreign language achievement correlates positively with social competence and can predict the development of social competence among Chinese EFL adolescents. Besides, the relationship between English achievement and social competence can be modulated by emotion regulation after controlling for gender, age, and non-verbal intelligence.

Our research has found a positive correlation and prediction between foreign language achievement and social competence in Chinese adolescents, which is consistent with a large body of previous research conducted in preschoolers and primary school students in English-speaking countries (e.g., Bornstein et al. 1998; Dağal 2017; Ertanir et al. 2021; Jurkic et al. 2023; Longoria et al. 2009; Longobardi et al. 2015, 2016; Monopoli and Kingston 2012; Nærland 2011; Ren et al. 2016; Sun et al. 2021). While the predictive effect of overall academic achievement on social competence has also been reported in Chinese primary school students (e.g., Liu et al. 2023), the current study further clarifies the specific role of learning English as a foreign language in the development of adolescents’ social competence in a non-English-speaking environment. Additionally, the novel aspect of our finding may suggest that foreign language achievement predicts social competence regardless of whether the dominant language used in their social interactions is their native language or second/foreign language, not only for preschoolers and primary school students but also for older junior high school adolescents. This finding provides new evidence for the bilingual advantages from the perspective of social competence.

Another important finding is that emotion regulation can predict the development of adolescents’ social competence. This finding extends previous studies in preschoolers (e.g., Hamaidi et al. 2021; Zeman et al. 2006), suggesting that emotion regulation can predict social competence not only in early childhood but also in adolescence. Emotion regulation can also modulate the relationship between foreign language achievement and social competence, which is in accordance with previous studies conducted in Chinese-English bilingual preschoolers (see Ren et al. 2016 for a review). Our finding suggests that adolescents with lower English achievement may not display social behavioral problems if they can regulate their emotions by the strategies of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression. This modulating effect is probably attributed to the reason that adolescents are building their emotion regulation strategies, social competence as well as developing their own language ability to express their emotions at the same time during their adolescence (Zeman et al. 2006). This finding demonstrates the relationship between internal emotion regulation mechanisms, foreign language ability, and social competence, providing SOCIAL (Beauchamp and Anderson 2010) with new empirical evidence on the ability development among adolescents from a cross-language background.

However, we fail to find the association between native language achievement and social competence, which contradicts what is found in the Indo-European language (e.g., Monopoli and Kingston 2012; Nærland 2011; Ren et al. 2016). This discrepancy may be attributed to the fact that Mandarin Chinese education, at least in junior high schools, focuses more on literature or cultural elements (i.e., less on social skills) while English courses focus more on linguistic knowledge that is necessary for daily social interactions. In addition, the Mandarin Chinese ability required for daily social interactions is similar during adolescence, leading to a low impact on social competence. Nevertheless, our finding is consistent with the findings in Chinese-English bilingual children in a younger group (6–9 years) in an immigrant context (Chen et al. 2014). Future studies can further look into the relationship between native language achievement and social competence.

One limitation of the current study is that our analyses rely on self-reported social competence and emotion regulation from a relatively small sample size of adolescents, which is less optimal for showing their real condition and generalizing the findings. Future research may recruit a larger sample size of adolescents and include assessments from parents and teachers to provide a more holistic evaluation of the adolescents’ social competence. Furthermore, the current study is cross-sectional, which cannot establish the causal relationships between foreign language achievement and social competence. Therefore, a longitudinal design will be conducted to determine causality and the possible long-term interrelations between these constructs. Notwithstanding these limitations, our results provide new evidence for the significance of bilingualism from a social-emotional perspective. In other words, English serves as not only one of the compulsory subjects in the Chinese education system (Liu et al. 2023), but also a valuable tool to enhance adolescents’ social competence, which has significant implications for the formulation of foreign language education policies and the development of all-round education. In addition, our results can be relevant in terms of practices and prevention of potential social and emotional difficulties among adolescent EFL learners.

Conclusion

Starting from the advantages of bilingualism, this study delved into the relationship between bilingual education and social competence in Chinese EFL adolescents through questionnaires. The results showed that foreign language achievement can positively predict the development of social competence, and the relationship between these two variables can be modulated by emotion regulation. This study enriches the theory of bilingual advantages and emphasizes the significance of foreign language education.