Abstract
The development of students’ social awareness is an important aim of language teaching because it promotes empathy, perspective taking and responsible social behaviour. However, short story writing instruction often prioritizes linguistic competence while giving limited attention to students’ social and emotional development. This study examined the effectiveness of the Social Sensitivity-Integrated Problem-Based Learning (SSI-PBL) model in enhancing students’ social awareness through short story writing activities. A quasi-experimental design with a control group and pre-test post-test measurements was employed. The participants were 70 eighth-grade students from a public secondary school in Indonesia, divided into an experimental group (n = 35) and a control group (n = 35). Data were collected using a validated social awareness questionnaire and a short story writing assessment rubric and were analyzed using descriptive statistics and analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) to determine the effect of the intervention while controlling for baseline differences. The findings revealed that students in the experimental group demonstrated significantly higher levels of social awareness than those in the control group after the intervention (F(1.67) = 93.49, p < 0.001, partial η² = 0.58). Furthermore, the adjusted mean score of the experimental group was substantially higher than that of the control group (88.64 versus 77.84). The results indicate that integrating authentic social issues into problem-based short story writing activities effectively promotes social awareness, empathy, perspective-taking and social responsibility. These findings suggest that the SSI-PBL model provides a valuable pedagogical framework for integrating social development with language learning and writing instruction.
Keywords: Language Education, Problem-based Learning, Quasi-experimental Study, Short Story Writing, Social Sensitivity.