The improvement of mental health has been given considerable attention in educational settings since more than four decades. Accordingly, many programs were developed with the purpose of enabling children not only to deal with educational issues, but also to resolve their psychosocial problems. This study used an Explanatory Mixed-Methods Research Design to investigate the extent to which pre-service English teachers in Iran believed that educational therapy and life skills training should be included in English Language Teaching curricula. The collection of quantitative data was accomplished by administering the Life-Responsive Language Teaching Beliefs Questionnaire (LLTBQ) to 97 Iranian pre-service English teachers. Accordingly, among the four constructs of life-responsive language teaching (i.e., life-wise empowerment, adaptability enhancement, prosocial development, and life-over-language preference), teachers were more likely to highlight the importance of enhancing the adaptability enhancement and life-wise empowerment of language learners. The follow-up phase involved face-to-face interviews that were conducted with eight pre-service English teachers who were selected based on purposive sampling. While pre-service teachers’ responses to the questionnaire items as well as the initial comments provided by the interviewees indicated an overall interestedness on the part of most participants, their conceptions of what educational therapy and life skills training might actually entail appeared to be incomplete. Finally, the authors put forward a three-facet model of life-wise language teaching perceptions and a detailed hierarchy thereof.
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